Hosts and Hostages

                A light shone onto Gavin's closed eyes. It was bright and sudden enough to make his head flinch away, as if illumination could be dodged with sufficient acrobatic talents. He'd just been drifting off to sleep in the darkened bedroom, quite innocently minding his own business by relinquishing consciousness without a battle, and now there was a floodlight directed at his face. It just wasn't on.
                "Urrggh" He articulated to his wife, Sandra. She'd probably snuck into bed, doing an excellent job of slipping under the covers without disturbing him, and then elected to review a hundred full-brightness images of the sun on her phone, presumably with the torch on as well to maximise luminescence.
                Even by Sandra's standards this was an aggressive stance to adopt on lighting. Normally she at least made a perfunctory attempt to turn the screen away from Gavin's face a little, or hid under the covers if she was feeling particularly magnanimous, but this time it felt like she was trying to shine through his eyelids and burn out his retinas. As far as Gavin knew, Sandra didn't want to blind him; she'd certainly had several opportunities over the years and not taken declined them. But there were few other explanations for the photonic assault he was currently experiencing.
                "Urgh." He reasserted, spelling out his point to Sandra. He didn't like to patronise her with a repeated grunt but desperate times called for desperate measures, and he was ever so sleepy. Still the light shone strong.
                Against his assertive force of will, Gavin found consciousness and cognizance gradually creeping back into his mind, checking at every doorway to make sure that sleep really had left the premises for the time being. With the return of consciousness came a suspicious awareness that he didn't feel quite as warm or wrapped up as he should do. His pyjamas were still firmly in place, or softly in place to be more accurate, but there was a weight missing where the duvet should have been. Righteousness billowed up from Gavin's diaphragm, the most sanctimonious organ, when he concluded that Sandra had not only snuck in and lit him up, but she had also stolen all of the covers. The sheer nerve! There was nothing else for it. He was going to have to use full words and, worst of all, open his eyes.
                "Sandra, please! Do you have to steal the duvet and then shine that thing right at-" He said, pausing immediately upon looking towards where he thought Sandra's face ought to be. Generally there was a rule to be followed in these instances; hips at the level of the bed, torso above that, and head at the top, very much like the lamp atop a lighthouse when the phone was deployed. It was rare for that rule to be broken unless Sandra had got into bed upside down, which did happen on occasion. This time, however, the rule had been thrown right out. There was no bed in sight, no Sandra holding any kind of phone, and where the bedside table should have been was an open space of steel flooring, leading up to shiny metal walls which curved outwards slightly. Unless he or Sandra had been sleep re-decorating, there was something decidedly amiss.
                Gavin sat up sharply, his eyes wide despite the blinding illumination of the room. In a mental frenzy he racked his mind for any recollection of going to some strange metal cell after getting ready for bed, but no related memories came back to him. It was definitely just under the sheets and off to sleep.
                Smothering bewilderment wrapped its way around Gavin's body as he surveyed the room. It took what appeared to be perfectly normal metal and made it into something deeply confusing, by merit of nothing but an unexpected shape. By all accounts the metal table on which he laid was unremarkable, leaving aside the fact that a man in pyjamas was currently atop it. Admittedly the door was a little strange in shape; it curved on either side and rose to a point in the middle, somewhat like a leaf, but it also had two long horns extending outwards. Gavin hadn’t ever seen a door quite like it, mostly because of the extreme impracticality inherent in the shape. Granted it would be abundantly clear if the door was hung wonky, but that was also a curse. Unless it was fitted utterly immaculately, it would always look wrong. Thankfully, this one seemed to fit perfectly well.
                The bright light which had been assailing Gavin and interrupting his sleep was clearly not Sandra’s phone, but a bright ceiling light which spilled a white radiance over the room. Without any duvet or Sandra to be seen the jury was still out as to whether or not she had stolen it away from him, but if she had done so then it was still less of an issue than transporting him to this odd metallic cell. If she had wanted the bed to herself she could have just asked him to go and sleep on the sofa; this was taking things to a real extreme.
                Swinging his legs over to one side, Gavin rose to a seat on the table and wondered what he was planning to do. He couldn’t see any kind of lock, but if popular culture had taught him anything then it was that the door to a mysteriously-entered bare room would be sealed tight. A brief scan around, however, showed that there was nothing else to investigate. With a shrug, Gavin concluded that his plans had been made for him.
                Pushing off the sides of the metal table with his hands, Gavin touched his feet to the metal floor and immediately leapt back up. The floor was like ice, even more so than the blasted tiles that Sandra had insisted on putting in the bathroom. He scowled down at the floor distrustfully. Whatever intelligence or accident had brought him here clearly had no idea of how to furnish a hard-floored bedroom with the necessary bedside rug, nor had it thought to provide slippers.
                Perhaps, Gavin thought, this was the nature of the prison. The door could remain unlocked quite safely, because if the prisoner was unable to touch the arctic floor then there was no way to use it. Cunning. But whatever had incarcerated him hadn’t reckoned with years of training on Gavin’s own part, making nocturnal dashes to the lavatory and resisting the frosty torture from the tiles. If he could best that punishment for the sake of not wetting the bed, then he could best the floor for the sake of his own freedom.
                Channelling the focus and passion of a hundred midnight urination emergencies, Gavin pushed off the metal table again and hopped painfully from foot to foot. It was a technique he'd picked up from watching a documentary about lizards in the desert and made him feel like a rugged survivor of harsh terrain. Cold from the floor penetrated quickly into his flesh, as if it was being injected directly into his bones, threatening to freeze and solidify the soles of his feet and leave everything frostbitten. He did not relent however, pressing onwards through the lack of slippers until the door was upon him.
                Gavin reached out for the door handle before realising that there was nothing to grab. Under normal circumstances he would have spent time examining it and looking for a mechanism to open it. But with the new sense of urgency afforded by hypothermic feet Gavin took a leap of faith and pushed hard against the steel door. There was a clunk as something in the lock or the frame came into contact with the door, but then no more movement.
                Although it was perfectly in line with his expectations, Gavin was still annoyed that the door didn't open. His toes were rapidly icing over, and making the whole trek back to the metal table just wasn't going to happen. With the righteous anger of someone in dire need of socks or a decent carpet, Gavin unleashed a double-armed shove on the closed door. The same clunk as before repeated itself, just in case Gavin hadn't understood the first time, but he was still in no mood to listen. When the door stopped he continued to push, asserting his entitlement to freedom against the nefarious forces of locked doors.
                There was initially some resistance, but then with a scraping and grinding sound the door swung open outwards. Not entirely expecting this, despite trying his best to achieve it, Gavin staggered after the door which had previously been supporting his full body weight and fell face first on the floor outside. Although made from the same bare metal as that of his cell, this flooring was not as icily cold. In fact it was pleasantly heated. Hurrying more to thaw his feet than for dignity or safety safe, Gavin scrabbled back upright and felt the warmth infusing into his frosted soles.
                He closely watched his angry red feet become even redder as they absorbed warmth from the flooring. He wiggled them a few times to make sure they still worked and marvelled at how quickly their colour was able to change, coming back to life from the brink of frozen horror.
                Once he was happy that his feet were still in working order, Gavin looked up to gauge his surroundings. Surrounding was, it turned out, the correct term, as he found himself encircled by a series of approximately ten lifeforms, all looking intently at his feet.
                A yelp of surprise brought their attention up to Gavin's face, which was looking particularly perturbed. For their part they either weren’t startled or didn’t show it in the same way that humans did. None of them moved or spoke; they just stared quietly and almost politely at him for a moment before returning their gazes to his feet.
                "Erm, hello?" He asked uncertainly. The way they held themselves implied a certain intelligence, or at least sentience, even if their appearance didn’t lend itself to those who normally spoke English natively. Some of them were also sporting strange little metal hats, jauntily angled on the various types of head they each claimed as their own. “Who are you all?”
                Many of the lifeforms continued looking down at Gavin’s feet, but a few faced him again momentarily. If he didn’t know better, Gavin would have said that their gazes were patronising, regarding him like a puppy trying to bark along with a dinner table conversation. There was a patience to it, but Gavin didn’t feel that anyone needed to be patient with him when he tried to speak.
                “I’d quite like to know what’s going on here. And to know where here is, please.” He request slowly and clearly. Still there was no response. “Anyone?”
                Whilst scanning across the sea of ‘faces’ for any sign of a reaction, Gavin noticed that some of the eyes had flicked their focus slightly to one side of his face. Either they couldn’t quite muster eye-contact quite so soon after meeting him or there was something behind…
                Before he had time to spin around, something large and solid gripped onto the back of Gavin’s head and pushed it forwards, bending his neck until he too was looking directly at his feet again. He tried to push back against the force but it held it him tight, and even his attempts to duck down under it were futile; whatever had grabbed him was capable of holding Gavin in position just by his neck. It was far from comfortable, and most certainly not how he’d greet a visitor if he was the host.
                Struggling uselessly against the force, Gavin’s nostrils flared in primal fear when he heard a high pitched mechanical buzzing emanate from the space behind his head, like a small power-drill or particularly powerful electric toothbrush. A few short moments later he felt something press into the back of his head and run along his skull; it was a familiar sensation, but before Gavin could work out why he recognised it there was a distinctly unfamiliar cold sucking sensation in its place. No sooner had it relented than a helmet was plonked onto his head.
                “What the hell are you doing!?” Gavin shouted as the hand on his neck released him, spinning on his feels to face the assailant. As he spoke the helmet seemed to emit a series of sounds alongside his words, shocking him into silence just as much as the gargantuan frame of the lifeform which had presumably provided the helmet. Suddenly Gavin felt that whatever the hell the lifeform had been doing, it would be perfectly free to carry on whether Gavin liked it or not. His own face was at around chest height on the creature, whose bulging muscular frame threatened to break free of its bright yellow spandex shirt. Where the muscles threatened, translucent auburn hairs took action, poking through the fabric and turning it into a carpet of horribly clashing colours. High above the chest, flanked by two arms the width of Gavin’s waist, was a shaggy-haired head. It was reminiscent of a dumpster with a face drawn onto it.
                “Welcome aboard, victim! Don’t be alarmed, we were just fitting your translator.” Someone said from behind. At least, Gavin presumed someone said it. He had certainly heard noises, but they didn’t match the words which had entered his mind.
                "You might have just told me that rather than half breaking my neck and slamming it onto my head!" Gavin protested with an angry confidence that he immediately determined to be a bad move when surrounded.
                "We didn't think you'd understand without the translator." The voice responded.
                Gavin paused. The thing had a point. Quite a pronounced one in fact; the creature addressing him had a head which was twice the size of Gavin's own and almost a perfect teardrop shape, with a bulbous throat tapering up to a terrifyingly sharp peak at the cranium. Three long elliptical eyes ran vertically down his head, spaced to cover roughly 180 degrees of face-space, above a stubby nose and broad mouth. Of comparable total height to Gavin, it seemed like an extraordinary amount of head to support on such a small body. The body was, Gavin noted, clad in a similar spandex garment to the giant who had conducted the helmet strike, but coloured in lime green.
                The sight of this strange creature was running on something of a delay in Gavin’s mind. His brain knew on some level that such a life form had no business existing outside of the imagination, but it was hard to entirely disregard something which was talking directly to him. It was also impossible to simply assume that the head was a large hat, because no-one’s hat ever blinked quite that much. Gavin’s mind understood that it was too narrow to accept what it was seeing, and therefore concluded it shouldn’t try. His sense of disbelief was given the order to stand down and wait until such a time as the mind had been sufficiently broadened to comprehend the situation.
                Bereft of the initial reaction of shock, Gavin ticked onto the next most pressing issue.
                "Why are you all staring at my feet? You aren't planning to cut them off are you?" He asked accusingly. Whatever these creatures were, he’d seen no evidence that they didn’t eat feet.
                "What? No!” the teardrop creature denied with disgust. “Is that something your race does? That would be horrible. Captains don’t eat the feet of their prisoners where we come from."
                "Yeah.” Another life form to the teardrop’s side agreed. This one was taller with smooth but bumpy skin hanging loosely from a broad skull. At the very least this one had eyes in the more traditional pair, even if they were a sickly yellow. “Besides, you were looking at them first. We just joined in.” It explained. As its jaw moved Gavin could see what he faintly hoped to be muscle poking out of holes in the skin. It wasn’t a single continuous covering like humans had, but more like a saggy flesh colander. Gavin hoped he never had to say or think the phrase “saggy flesh colander” again in his life.
                “What are you waiting for them to do, anyway?" The teardrop asked.
                "Hm?” Gavin started, the question shaking him out of his fascination with the hanging skin. “Oh, nothing. They were cold and now they’re warming up. The floor in there is freezing!" Complaining about a cold floor held a comforting familiarity and Gavin was subconsciously drawn to it.
                "Hm. Yes that is above the cryogenics lab. And this corridor is above a thermal vent pipe. But your feet were obviously going to be cold without any shoes or socks on." Teardrop assessed, lacking sympathy.
                "I don't tend to wear those to bed.” Gavin defended through gritted-but-recently-brushed teeth. teeth. “Speaking of which, where the hell am I? I went to bed just like normal, but now I’ve woken up here. It feels like there should be an intermediary step and I have a feeling you’re involved in it."
                The lifeforms huddled away from Gavin and held a hushed conversation for a few moments. After some curt nodding the spokes-teardrop turned back to him.
                “Yes. Yes we were involved with that.”
                “It took a committee to reach that conclusion?”
                They lifeforms huddled again to discuss the question, rhetoric apparently not making it through the translator.
                “Yes, we did.” Teardrop enlightened again. “Wouldn’t want to reveal too much without everyone’s agreement.”
                Gavin rubbed his face with his hands.
                “I thought you said you were a captain? Surely that means you can make the decisions?”
                “Well…” the teardrop said, blushing a slight green colour. “… I mean, yes I am. But it’s good to be democratic about this.”
                “Aye, Captain Kuill always talks things over with us first.” Another of the creatures added. This one looked like it was made of glass scales of various colours. “Makes sure that everyone” it indicated towards itself and the other lifeforms “are on board with what’s going on before making any important choices.”
                Gavin didn’t take in too much of what it was saying. He was too busy staring in fascination at the glassy creature’s body. It appeared to be a selection of loose glass chippings which held themselves together by forces unknown, rather than a single entity. Its arms shifted around its body like a wave rather than a fixed appendage, with a tinkling of scales like someone stirring a bucket of glass shards. This one wasn’t wearing a spandex uniform, unsurprisingly. It would have quickly have become spandex shreds whatever happened.
                “That I do.” Captain Kuill said proudly, holding his teardrop head a little higher. “It’s not like I know what I’m doing any more than the other crew do anyway, ha!”
                There were murmurs of jovial assent from the others.
                “But this is no place to be having important chats. Come this way.”
               
                Captain Kuill led Gavin and his crew, many of whom were still doing a bad job of trying to surreptitiously throw glances at Gavin's feet, out of a door at the end of the corridor. This one didn't have two horns but had replaced them with a series of mug-handle loops. Somehow there was a solid section of wall left in place in the centre of each handle, even when the door opened. Gavin tried not to think about it too much.
                “I would like to know where I am, please.” Gavin said, with the translator broadcasting on a slight delay afterwards, like an echo which hadn’t been paying enough attention to what was said in the first place.
                “You’re in a corridor.” Captain Kuill answered confidently.
                “That’s not what I meant and I suspect you know it.”
                “Corridor 16-K” One of the other crew members specified. It sounded like the saggy flesh colander.
                “Yeah, so that means nothing to me.” Gavin explained. “I meant ‘Where am I?’ on a slightly broader scale. Where is the corridor?”
                “Level 16. Kth… er… 11th corridor.” Another crew member explained.
                “Level of what? And where is the “what” of which I am in the 11th corridor of the 16th level?” Gavin asked irritably, not really trying to mask his frustration.
                “Erm…” Captain Kuill responded, pausing for thought. “Pardon?”
                “He means the ship, I think.” The glassy entity speculated.
                Gavin stopped abruptly. A couple of the crew members behind him didn’t notice and walked directly into his back.
                “Oof. Ship?” he asked, a little shocked. Having already learned that Captain Kuill was a captain, it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise.
                "You'll be home in no time, don't you worry." Captain Kuill said brightly from ahead, without turning, as he pushed through another illogical shape masquerading as a door.
                Wet sucking noises drew closer and louder behind Gavin, and he momentarily suspected that someone might be creeping up on him with a collection of damp plungers. If someone tried to unclog him with a rubber cleaning implement then they would regret it.
                "Did we reach a resolution on the foot-watching? Can we look up yet?" A voice behind his right ear asked.
                "Yes, false alarm. He was just interested in watching them warm up. Apparently it's surprising that cold floors make feet cold and warm ones make them warm if you're not wearing shoes." The glassy creature said with an air of slight disappointment.
                "I don't wear shoes and I'm alright." the new voice pointed out.
                “I wish you would, sometimes. When you take a particularly mucusy step and forget to wipe it up it’s pretty awful.”
                “Yeah, yeah. That’s why I’ve got these though, isn’t it?” The apparently mucus-heavy creature replied, with a rattle like the shaking of spurs.
                Curiosity getting the better of him, Gavin risked a glance behind him and a saw what looked like a humanoid gorilla crafted from a single gigantic slug. It wore the same brightly coloured spandex uniform as the rest of the crew, but the elasticated fabric seemed to be simultaneously stretching over the body and squeezing the soft, boneless flesh underneath. Disconcertingly it was also soaking through slightly with slime. Down at its sticky, suckered feet Gavin saw that it was wearing some kind of futuristic mops attached to spur-like straps around its ankles to soak up the mucus trail it left behind. With a shudder, Gavin looked forwards and started walking again.
                Captain Kuill hadn’t stopped to wait, instead surging forwards through another doorway. This one was particularly inconvenient, on account of the large rectangle of wall which rose from the ground directly in the centre of the door. It effectively turned the opening into a negative croquet hoop, around which it was necessary to squeeze oneself. Colourfully blinking lights were visible on the other side.
                Once he had made his way awkwardly through the hoop-way Gavin looked to the room before him and came to a halt again, immediately recognising what it was supposed to be. From years of watching sci-fi, he had formed a solid basis in his mind for what the bridge of a spaceship should look like. Banks of lights, switches and buttons would run around the edge, complimented by rows of screens. A handful of control stations with large swivel chairs should be scattered around with ample space to walk between them or lean over the back for a dramatic conversation. And at the front there should be a floor-to-ceiling window or display screen to show the immensity of space outside or anyone trying to make a video call.
                What Gavin saw in this case was more like a seaside amusements hall than a masterpiece of aerospace engineering, but it was still recognisable as the ship’s main command hub. A selection of control stations, seats and lights made that obvious.
                In the centre was a broad and partially reclined chair with a set of pedals and a steering wheel in place just in front, which Gavin presumed to be how the ship was steered. It was either that or the most peculiar setup for controlling the air condition that he’d ever seen.
                True to predictions, however, the driving seat was at least facing a large window, through which the Earth was visible below. Gavin stared at it, unable to reconcile his sense of scale. The only thing he could think was that it would be incredibly difficult to judge the dimensions of the ship using only this window. Parallel parking would be a nightmare. Add to that the fact that you’d need a whole free street to be able to park along anyway and it just became an impractical endeavour from the start.
                Between the driving seat and the window were two suspiciously arcade-like cabinets, each one with a pad of four buttons and a joystick. Both of the screens were either dormant or just intentionally displaying a matte black, awaiting the return of their crewmembers. Thinking about it, Gavin observed that there was nobody manning the bridge at all. He tried not to conclude that the whole crew had wandered down to collect him with Captain Kuill, but didn’t enjoy much success on that front.
                One final chair sat a few metres behind the driving seat. This one gave the distinct impression of having been crafted from the fallen bodies of several former chairs, a macabre patchwork of mismatched materials with every dimension at least a foot thicker than it needed to be. It swivelled on a great axle shaft and sat on a pedestal at least a metre above everybody else. Quite aside from the extreme decadence, it looked like it would be a total nightmare to clamber into with anything like dignity.
                Gavin was shaken from his survey of the bridge by another collision from behind, presumably because the crew were still distractedly focusing on discussions around his feet rather than looking where they were going. With the force of the impact he was staggered forwards, narrowly avoiding a tumble down some steep and seemingly unnecessary steps.
                “Mind those chilly feet of yours.” Captain Kuill called to Gavin, as he approached the throne behind the driving seat. “Join me!
                Gavin spared the time for a brief judgemental scowl at the traffic collision behind him and then accepted Captain Kuill’s invitation. The floors here were cooler than the corridor and warmer than the cell, but there still wasn’t a rug in sight. There wasn’t one in hearing either.
                “Welcome to the bridge!” Captain Kuill declared grandly. Taking this as an opportunity for a second inspection, Gavin looked about himself and noticed that, also like a seaside arcade, the bridge was a little ramshackle. Tarnishing had set in on many of the surfaces and workstations, some of the fixtures were showing signs of wear, and it appeared that the padding around the buttons on the cabinets had been eroded away long ago.
                “Erm... thanks?” Gavin tried, feeling like it was the correct response despite feeling very little gratitude.
                “You're welcome. It's so nice to have a polite prisoner from the offset. Most take a fair while to settle in and stop screaming about kidnap and whatnot.”
                Gavin tensed inside. He very much wanted to scream about being stolen away from his bed in the middle of the night. If ever he had to get up and answer the phone after going to sleep he gave the person on the other end a good shouting at, and this was clearly much more disruptive. But now that he'd been praised for not doing so it felt very awkward to start. With a short sharp sigh he reluctantly accepted the fact that he would have to bite his tongue on that topic.
                "When you say prisoner..." Gavin started, trying to find the right set of words not to invite himself being locked up "what are you getting at? I mean, I don't seem to be in a cell."
                "In fairness, that's because you bent the local and broke out." The glassy entity pointed out.
                "Well, OK yes I did that, but it wasn't a very strong lock if I could push through it."
                "Most people don't try." The slug man countered. "It hasn't been a problem yet because everyone has been polite enough to accept that locked means locked." It added with a note of reprimand.
                "And everyone I've met has been polite enough not to abduct me from my bed and lock me in a room on their spaceship, but let's not quibble over the details." Gavin answered passive-aggressively.
                “Speaking of polite,” Captian Kuill interjected “I think we should introduce you to the rest of the crew. This is Chief Engineer Hoktark.” He said, holding a hand towards the glassy creature. It nodded. “She takes care of the running of the engines, the ship’s systems, the central heating timer, and that kind of thing. Very good she is too!”
                Gavin saw the slug-being roll its stalked eyes as Chief Engineer Hoktark lapped up the praise.
                “This slimy fellow here is Second Engineer Jich’slyr.” The captain continued, speaking through a significant amount of mucus at the back of his throat to get the pronunciation correct. “He assists Hoktark as and where necessary. He’ll be fixing the lock on the prison door, I’d imagine!” he added with a chuckle. Jich’slyr didn’t find the prospect to be quite as amusing.
                “I’m Doctor Bequit!” boomed a voice from Gavin’s right, moving around excitedly to the front of him and pushing Hoktar and Jich’slyr out of the way. The hulking frame was instantly recognisable as the beast which had fitted Gavin’s translator.  Thinking about it for a moment, Gavin slowly recalled the sound and sensation against his head which felt so familiar, along with the subtle sensation of something drifting gently onto his feet. Gavin looked down and saw a few clipped hairs resting on top of his toes.
                “You shaved me!” Gavin uttered.
                “Yes! To make good contact for the translator.” Doctor Bequit beamed.
                "I'm going to look like an idiot!"
                "The translator covers it all up. It's fine." The doctor placated sincerely.
                "I can't very well wear this down there can I? People will think I'm a nut job if I start telling them about this at all, let alone when actually wearing a tin foil hat. So it's either that or the shaved strip. Either way it's not great for me." Gavin complained angrily.
                "I... I didn't mean any harm. I just wanted you to be able to understand us. I'm sorry." Doctor Bequit apologised with a tremble, his voice descending into a whimper as his lower lip started to quiver.
                "Oh... Oh come on now. Don't be upset."
                "That wasn't very nice." Hoktark chastised. Jich’slyr nodded in agreement.
                “I only wanted to help…” the doctor snivelled.
                Captain Kuill shot Gavin a displeased glance.
                "I'm sorry Doctor Bequit.” Gavin said softly. “It's fine. It'll grow back. No harm done."
                The doctor's head lifted a touch.
                "Really?"
                "Yes. It's all alright."
                The whimpering transformed immediately back into a beaming grin wide enough to engulf dinner tables, Doctor Bequit’s mood swinging so quickly that it probably put the ship off course.
                "Brilliant! It really is lovely to meet you then." He declared, wrapping Gavin in a tight hug. Upon having the gargantuan chest crushed into his face, Gavin was able to determine that the translucent hairs were actually less like hair and more like jellyfish tendrils, squishing gently against his cheeks and hopefully not laden with stingers and venom.
                "Yes, lovely to meet you too." Gavin managed with what little air was left in his body. Doctor Bequit released him. "Also, erm, thank you for letting me understand everyone." Gavin said with a sincerity that startled even himself. "Kidnap isn't fun but it would be a lot scarier if I couldn't work out what anyone was saying. Especially if you had tried to hug me like that."
                Doctor Bequit started to well up.
                "You are SO welcome." He said as he lunged in for another hug.
                A few smothering minutes later, with several moments of false hope in which Bequit loosened his grip before crunching in again, Gavin was released.
                “There, all made up!” Captain Kuill announced happily. “Now who’s next?”
 
There were approximately a dozen more crewmembers on the bridge, and Captain Kuill went through them one-by-one for Gavin. It was something of a futile effort because Gavin was just about at his limit of name remembrance by the time he’d been introduced to Doctor Bequit, and that name only stuck in because he’d spent a long time crushed against the good doctor’s chest. The flesh colander’s name was something that sounded like ‘Geoffrey’ if every other letter was shouted, and held the position of security officer. A short, slender bodied entity with a head like an enormous raisin, apparently fulfilling the role of ship’s entertainer, said a quick hello and then disappeared. Its name sounded like it probably began with an E or an I, but that was as much as Gavin retained.
                Next had been something like a quadrupedal dolphin which acted as the ship’s maintenance staff, cleaning the floors and emptying the bins and the like, but Gavin missed the name, being too distracted by the glass urn of glowing purple which was drifting across the ceiling casually. That, apparently, was the ship’s chef.
                Deadened to the manifold solutions that life had adopted in its various environments, and noticing that there were no two crewmembers of the same race on board, Gavin nodded along with each introduction until Captain Kuill was finished.
                “And last, but not yet confirmed to be least, what is your name, new prisoner?” the captain asked. All eyes, echo-locating ears, and other sensory equipment was turned towards or focused on Gavin.
                “Uhh, I’m Gavin Miller. Hello.” He said uneasily. The prospect of speaking in front of everyone was more unnerving that the initial shock of being on a spaceship with a collection of aliens. He turned his gaze out of the window to avoid looking directly at anyone in particular and stared at the Earth, very gradually rotating in the viewing window. Grasping the distances at play here seemed beyond Gavin, but he knew that it was a very long way. Probably longer than it was from his old house to the office, which always took at least forty-five minutes, even in the school holidays.
                Something occurred to him.
                "How did I get here so quickly? Did you teleport me up!?"
                "Probably.”
                Gavin raised an eyebrow.
                “… well, more like maybe. Possibly. Potentially." Engineer Hoktark said with rapidly decreasing confidence. Gavin maintained an unimpressed, expectant look. "I don't know really." Hoktark finally confessed.
                "How can you not know?! You did it!"
                "Yeah, so what? We do things all the time. Doesn't mean anyone knows how." Hoktark argued.
                "Did it drag me through space? Did it break me down and rebuild me here?!" Gavin asked, thinking out loud with horror. One of those things meant he had technically died, bringing the list of crimes against him up to both kidnapping and murder. Either one of those in isolation was bad enough, but both was just unfair.
                "Ugh, both of those things sound ghastly. I hope not.” Captain Kuill assessed.
                “We just know that you can point at one thing down there and then it's up here. Sometimes the air or the floor or something comes with it too! All this spaceship tech amazes me every day." Hoktark explained with a glassy chattering of her face.
                “How…” Gavin pinched the bridge of his nose “how did you become the chief engineer? Don’t you know anything about engineering?”
                “Ha! No! I was a legal representative for companies who were sold printing contracts misleadingly. I just fancied being the chief engineer because it had a nice uniform and the engines are pretty.”
                “Tremendous.” Gavin said. It was just one word, but it carried a whole lifetime’s practice of sarcasm with it. “Forgive me for saying so, but I don’t feel terribly safe about being on a ship where the Chief Engineer doesn’t understand how it works, and only took the job because it had a pleasant uniform that she can’t wear because she’d shred it. I’d quite like to leave and go back to bed, please.”
                “No-one’s bought you yet!” Captain Kuill chuckled incredulously, filled with disbelief that Gavin should ask for something so absurd.
                “Bought me? I’m not going to be a bloody slave for anyone!”
                “Not like that!” Jich’slyr rebutted as if it were obvious. “Bought you back, he means. Paid your ransom.”
                “Oh. So I’m a hostage instead of a slave. I guess that’s a little bit better, but not much.” Gavin conceded, over-simplifying vast swathes of ethics and sociology. “But why me?”
                “Just picked you at random, same as usual. Nothing personal!” Engineer Hoktark informed him.
                “Oh for goodness sake.” Gavin sighed, bringing one hand up to his face.
                “If you picked me at random and don’t know who I, or anyone else, is…” he said, thinking along with his words.
                “Yes?” Captain Kuill replied.
                “… and if you have no way of knowing whether I’m worth any money…
                “Yes?” he repeated.
                “… then who are you asking to buy me back and why would they pay?”
                There was a silence. Captain Kuill looked at Chief Engineer Hoktark, who looked at Second Engineer Jich’slyr, who looked at the strange purple glass vessel whose name Gavin couldn’t remember, who somehow communicated that their attention was back on Hoktark.
                Chief Engineer Hoktark tutted.
                “We’ve communicated a ransom demand by argon wave, hemispherical conduit broadcast, high power neutrino beam and magnetic krypto-fax. There’s no way it’ll be missed, and then you’ll be off on your merry business of eating soil and regurgitating food for your young.” She finally answered.
                Gavin stared at her silently for a moment.
                “OK” he finally said “so for one thing, I’ve never heard of any of those things. And for another, I don’t eat soil or regurgitate for my children. I think you’ve got me confused with earthworms and birds.” The revelation that they were expecting birds to pay for him left him deeply concerned.
                “Nah we watched your planet for ages. You’re one of the ones that bounces around on the floor for a bit, then goes in a tree, then gets in one of your primitive cars, then gets a rug put on them and goes into one of those wooden boxy buildings.” Doctor Bequit corrected, taking a very loose definition of the term ‘correct’. Gavin resolved never to let the medic perform any kind of procedure on him.
                “You have absolutely no idea what you’re doing, do you? I’m going to be trapped up here forever because you’re shouting nonsense into space rather than asking anyone to come and get me.”
                "It's only the same as when I was taken, you don't have to be such a diva about it." Jich’slyr chided.
                "Since you were taken!? What the Christ do you mean?” Gavin asked, horrified. “You're a prisoner too?"
                "Pah! No! Well, not anymore anyway. I worked my way up." Jich’slyr said with a note of pride.
                "I can't believe what I'm hearing."
                "I know, brilliant isn't it?! The social mobility of this enterprise really is worthy of praise and recognition. A lot of societies could learn from this example." Captain Kuill said.
                "What? No. Or yes. Maybe. It's not the point. The point is that you were kidnapped and now you're doing it to other people." Gavin accused Jich’slyr.
                "Hey now, I'm no worse than anyone else. We're all doing it."
                "Yeah, leave him be." Engineer Hoktark supported.
                "Doesn't make us wrong." Said the quadrupedal dolphin.
                "Wait...” Gavin muttered, looking at each of the aliens in turn. “How many of you started off that way? As hostages?"
                A sea of hands rose, with waves of nods and capsizing boats of murmured responses. It looked suspiciously like everyone.
                “Are any of you from the original crew?”
                There were no takers. A couple of the crew conferred amongst themselves, asking their peers to help them remember if they were from the original group or not, but no-one found any evidence of that.
                "Why the hell are you all still at it, then?"
                “Well… I erm… it’s all we know I guess. But it’s good, honest work!” Captain Kuill said defensively.
                “No it isn’t, it’s kidnapping and blackmail!” Gavin protested. “It’s literally the opposite of honesty.”
                “Oh… well yeah, it is a bit dishonest I suppose. But it pays well.”
                “You literally can’t get payment from taking me because no-one can hear your demands.” Gavin counterpointed again.
                “Nor from any of the other lads and ladies, actually.” Captain Kuill conceded. “That’s why they’re still on board in fact! But, uh, it keeps us busy.”
                “Yep, very busy.” Doctor Bequit agreed with a vast, toothy grin.
                “Nice and occupied.” The purple jar somehow informed them all.
                Gavin frowned slightly. It didn’t seem like a particularly persuasive argument. In fact, he got the impression that they were trying to convince themselves of what they were saying more than him.
                “Great. Now, since we’ve established that it doesn’t pay, it’s dishonest, and the only reason you do it is because you know nothing else and have nothing else to keep you busy, can I please go home?”
                Captain Kuill paused and thought about what Gavin was saying. The other crew members looked towards him uncertainly for guidance, not presuming to answer on his behalf. They weren’t equipped to anyway.
                “Let you go home?” He asked.
                “Yes. Let me leave because I’m no good to you, I do know something else as a trade, and I certainly have enough to keep me busy without kidnapping people. I wouldn’t fit in here at all.”
                “Hm. Hmm.” The captain pondered. “That’s an interesting proposition. But we need you with us to ransom back. If we don’t have you then we can’t get paid.”
                “Even if you do have me you can’t get paid. Earth can’t pay you. Earth can’t hear or talk to you.” Gavin reminded him.
                “Then… no. We can only give you back if we get paid for it. That’s how the transaction works.” Captain Kuill said with resolved certainty. “The old captain was particularly clear on that point. Not on much else, but that point was right there.”
                “Argh. You can’t get paid for me whatever happens! That’s what I’m trying to get you to realise.”
                “Then what good was it taking you in the first place?” Captain Kuill challenged.
                “It wasn’t! It don’t know why you bothered!”
                “To get paid!”
                “Bu… ugh.” Gavin sighed in gruff frustration. “Just let me go home, please?”
                “Even though no-one has bought you?” Captain Kuill asked, double-checking.
                “Yes.”
                “No. Sorry.”
                “Why?!”
                “I don’t know if we even can send you back.” Engineer Hoktark interrupted, hoping to smooth things over.
                “You… don’t know if you can?” Gavin said with a newfound calmness. He’d passed through to the other side of frustration.
                “It’s never come up.” Hoktark said with a weak smile in her strong, fragmented features. “No-one ever actually pays, like the captain said. That’s why we’re all here. I honestly don’t know if we even have a transporter that can go downwards instead of upwards. I mean, aiming would be a nightmare! At least you have something to grab onto when you’re bringing a person up. But going down? You might end up in the sea or half in the ground or something.”
                “It’d be awful on my conscience to know we’d hurt you by putting you back.” The captain said earnestly.
                Gavin stood in dumb silence. He’d been kidnapped by a bunch of inept ex-prisoner pirates with the intergalactic equivalent of Stockholm syndrome, who had never been paid and had no idea of how to put people back even if they did get their ransom. He rubbed the side of his head in disbelief.
                “We can always use more crew members though.” Jich’slyr told him, almost apologetically, as a peace offering. “Stations don’t man themselves, you know.”
                “No.” Gavin snapped. “No I’m not having this. You must have way of getting people back off the ship. What about when you disembark? We can just do that with me.”
                “We… um… we don’t. We can’t get off either.” The flesh colander admitted.
                “How do you get supplies then?” Gavin pressed, continuing his barrage of questions by focusing on logistics.
                “We zap it up to ourselves with the transporter. Like we do with the prisoners.” Hotkark told him, as if it was obvious.
                “Then why do you need money?”
                “To buy things.” Captain Kuill said slowly, preparing to explain the concept of currency.
                “Things like the things you steal and don’t need to pay for?”
                “Yeah.” The captain responded with a smile. “Wait, no. Well yes and no.”
                “To pay someone to tell us how to get off this ship mostly.” Jich’slyr said with resignation.
                Gavin had to sit down. This wasn't a standing up kind of conversation, nor was the magnitude of the impending sigh safe to conduct whilst on his feet. Without wanting to presume that he could sit in the captain’s chair, Gavin opted for the floor.
                “Are you checking the temperature of this floor with your behind instead of your feet? Are you preparing to burrow?” Doctor Bequit asked excitedly. “Are you keeping eggs warm!?”
                “What? No. Not at all. None of those things. I’m sitting down because none of that, absolutely none of it, makes any sense at all. Everything that everyone is doing on this ship is completely pointless and there is no way you will make money. You’re not taking hostages, you’re just collecting members of every race and locking them in an inescapable metal box with yourselves.”
                "I thought we weren't quibbling over the details." Engineer Hoktark grumbled.
                “Not being able to leave the ship doesn’t count as a ‘detail’. It’s more like a fundamental aspect of your business model and continued existence.” Gavin argued. “You must be able to work the teleporter or whatever it is well enough to be able to beam things up, so it should be trivial to reverse that.”
                “I don’t think I like that accusation. If it was trivial we’d have done it already.” Hoktark rebutted, her tone dropping into annoyance. Captain Kuill cleared his throat and gave her a pointed look. “One second.”
                Hoktark and the other crew gathered around Captain Kuill in another tight huddle.
                “Yes? OK? Good.” Gavin heard them mutter, before they broke away again.
                “Yes, if it was trivial we all agree that we definitely would have done it. But it’s not, so we haven’t, so you’re going to have to accept that.”
                “No I ruddy well am not! I’ll work it out myself if I have to.”
                There was a silence.
                “That’s a bold claim. Our best engineers have been trying for years without success.” Captain Kuill advised.
                “I had a go too. It’s a real doozy.” Doctor Bequit added, scratching his head for effect.
                “In fairness,” Gavin said, preparing not to be fair at all “your best engineers are just the people who wandered into the engineers’ quarters first and liked the uniforms.”
                “Yes, that’s our selection process. It’s not failed us yet, though. We’re still alive and travelling through space.” Captain Kuill replied, not backing down.
                “You’re still trapped, you mean?”
                “Call it what you like.”
                The quadrupedal dolphin cumbersomely sat down and rested its head near the floor to keep a close eye on Gavin’s feet, just in case something exciting happened.
                “Leaving the engineering track record aside for one moment, I am still going to find a way off this ship if it kills me.”
                “What if it doesn’t kill you?” Doctor Bequit asked with intrigued honesty.
                “Then that would be even better and I’ll leave in high spirits.” Gavin answered with yet more unnoticed sarcasm.             
                "Fine then! If you think you can work it out then be my guest." Hoktark relented. "But we've spent years pulling levers, pressing buttons and leaning on doors without getting anywhere at all."
                "If Hoktark is on board then it's a plan!” Captain Kuill bellowed happily. Remove the prisoner's manacles."
                "What manacles?" Gavin asked in a panic, standing up and looking about his body for secretly applied handcuffs. He found nothing.
                "You mean we- urgh. This is what happens when people break out. We forget to put the manacles on and then you’ve got a prisoner running riot on the bridge.” Captain Kuill lamented in irritation at the crew and Gavin. Many gazes were averted in embarrassed guilt. “Would you please not break out next time and let us put the manacles on?” The captain requested directly of Gavin. “Not that there’ll be a next time, but even so. Will you promise?"
                “Erm, I don’t know if I can make that promise in good conscience.”
                “You either promise, or you don’t get to look at the transporter.” The captain instructed, playing the hardball disciplinarian.
                Gavin sighed again.
                “Alright then, I promise.”
                “Marvellous!”
                Doctor Bequit slapped Gavin happily on the back in support of his acquiescence. Engineer Hoktark simply looked on derisively with her arms crossed.
                “Off you go then. I’ll catch up later to see your breakthrough.” She said.
                “Oh don’t be pouty Hoktark” Captain Kuill laughed. The glowing ceiling-chef gave the impression that it agreed with the captain.
 
                All paths led to the bridge, Gavin assumed, given the number of entrances he could see on the back wall. But in a continuation of the shipwright's, or maybe shipwrong's, theme the doors were not exactly uniform. Gavin was starting to suspect that a rogue band of irregular polygons was on the run and had chosen to hide themselves in plain sight as the doors of a spaceship. Of course that would imply the existence of shape police to be pursuing them, ones even worse than the pushy gym trainers he’d met on Earth.
                “Which way is the transporter room, please?” he asked anyone who would care to listen.
                “Right hand door. The semi-circle with a rectangle and an ellipse.” Jich’slyr said, pointing towards a shape that Gavin couldn’t really define. He settled, in the interim, on ‘a mess’.
                “Right. Thanks.”
                “Follow it until you come to a lift, take it down three floors, then take a right when you exit, followed by another right, then a left into the transporter room.”
                “Uh… OK.” Gavin said. He wasn’t confident that he could remember the directions, but he also wasn’t convinced he’d remember them if they were repeated. At least this way he could get on with getting himself lost in the spaceship.
                Gavin walked over to the indicated doorway, hoping secretly that someone had decided to come along with him. When he turned around, however, he saw that the whole crew was once again huddled in a committee meeting about something or other. Reaching out with one hand, Gavin gave the door a gentle push in the centre. He was entirely unsure of where the door would hinge, given its unorthodox shaping, so pushing it in the centre seemed like the course of action which would give the greatest chance of the door actually yielding. True to his expectations of not having a clue what to expect, the hinges were on the floor and the door folded down and away from him. Gavin made an effort to step on the very edges as he passed through to avoid breaking it.
                Following the instruction as best he could remember, Gavin found the lift. It was already open and waiting for him, which saved any tediousness around working out how to call it. It did not save him, however, from the tediousness of working out how to get to the floor on which he wished to be. The translators were all well and good for speech, but the writing on the buttons in front of him was still in an entirely foreign language. They might have been perfectly simple numbers and symbols, but they still meant nothing to the Earthling in his silly metal hat.
                Thinking about it for a moment, Gavin wondered if the translator was working properly to begin with. It would make a lot more sense for the invasive headpiece to be malfunctioning than for a selection of space pirates to be operating on such a nonsensical business model. Maybe the translator had just been garbling their words and relaying utter trash to him instead of what the pirates were saying.
                Gavin leaned against the rear wall of the lift to contemplate this. As much as his rational mind wanted it to be true, it couldn’t help but point out that everything the aliens had said had been coherent in terms of aligning with their body language and Gavin’s responses. That would have been too much of a coincidence to be explained by a faulty translator. The brief glimmer of hope faded, and Gavin once again faced up to the fact that he was dealing with a group of incompetents.
                Between staring at the control panel and pondering on the translator functionality, the crew’s conference had apparently completed. Footsteps along the corridor were the only warning Gavin received that someone was coming. He tried to look busily at the buttons as Jich’slyr emerged.
                “Well, you didn’t get lost then. Just stuck.” The slug assessed.
                “I’m having a spot of bother with the lift.”
                “But you’ll be able to work the much-more-complicated transporter better than we can?” he sassed, apparently happy enough to follow Hoktark’s lead in that matter.
                “Please take us to it.” Gavin said flatly, not engaging with the goad.
                Jich’slyr pressed the button which Gavin had suspected to be the light switch. With a creaking sound the doors slid shut and the lift started to descend. A quiet melody drifted out of an unseen speaker as the lift achieved motion, and the translator immediately morphed it into some perfectly mediocre lift music. Neither Gavin nor Jich’slyr made any attempt at small-talk, nor medium-sized or large-talk for that matter.
                A klaxon was transformed into a ‘bing’ by the translator when the lift came to a halt, and the doors opened once again to a brightly lit corridor much like the others Gavin had seen. If there was any consistency in this ship it was in the narrow passageways and halls. Perplexingly, the shape of the lift’s doorway on the lower floor was a different shape to the one above, but it still opened perfectly well.
                Without pausing to review the doorway’s shape himself, Jich’slyr led the way towards the transporter room with Gavin following behind. After what Gavin felt must have been more turns than he’d been instructed to make, Jich’slyr pulled open an hour-glass shaped door. It didn’t pull outwards in the traditional sense, rather sliding out like an enormous drawer until there was enough of a gap for Gavin and Jich’slyr to walk around it and into the transporter room.
                If Gavin had been harbouring any expectations regarding the transporter room they were now out of the window. In keeping with the bridge there was another collection of arcade-style cabinets with inbuilt screens and a handful of control inputs, but these ones were arranged in a back-to-back ring in the centre of the room. Having counted two engineers but more than two cabinets, the lack of control over the ship’s transport system wasn’t terribly surprising.
                Running down one of the walls was a pair of thick steel pipes. Each one had been fitted with a round valve handle, the one on the left slightly higher than that on the right. Where they reached the floor they took a sharp turn to run along it, eventually disappearing into a rectangular metal case with a few levers poking out.
                Beyond that, the transporter room was fairly bare. Each of the cabinets had a stool to go with it, but they were pushed back and out of the way as if disused. Gavin found it hard to believe that with so few controls to change they’d been unable to reverse the transport process. Or even, from an entirely different perspective, that they’d been unable to find a door through which to exit the ship after all this time. After talk of the ‘old captain’ and previous crew who were no longer around it followed that there must have been a way to leave. He just had to find it.
                “So what does all of this do, then?” Gavin asked Jich’slyr, who was leaning against a wall just inside the transporter room.
                Jich’slyr frowned slightly. It was clear even from his alien features that he was considering refusing to answer. The prisoner had been arrogant enough to imply that he could do better than the whole engineering team, so why should the engineering team have to explain anything at all? Then again, the engineering team really was just fumbling in the darkness, so Gavin had a point. And it would be great to finally leave the ship one day, so hindering that effort was probably going to be counterproductive.
                “Stuff. Stuff to do with the transporter.” He said at first, to at least make an effort at churlishness. “That control station” he pointed to the one farthest from the door “gets it to fire, or turn on, or whatever it is it does. The two next to it aim it or something, I don’t know. They tend to display something like the planet we’re near, so I guess it’s for saying where the stuff or the person we want is.”
                Gavin wandered over to the cabinets to take a look as Jich’slyr described things. The screens of these were active, and indeed the two supposed aiming cabinets were displaying aspects of Earth. One of them seemed to be showing the part of England from which Gavin had been stolen.
                “Hm.” He appraised.
                “The other two we don’t use as much. Not sure what they do, but we manage to steal well enough without them so it doesn’t seem worth worrying about. Over there on those pipes are the other control valves. Transporter doesn’t always work unless we give them a damn good turning. Sometimes it takes one rotation, sometimes three. We turn both to be sure but it might only need one.”
                Gavin looked across to the pipes dubiously.
                “And those levers in the box are important too, otherwise the transporter can make the engines go funny. Get very hot or very cold and then the whole ship’s out of whack for a few days.”
                “Right… OK. And that’s it?”
                “That’s everything we know. Everything we need to know to make it work really.” Jich’slyr saod.
                “So there’s something to make it work, something to aim it, a couple of controls you ignore, and some valves and levers which may or may not do anything?”
                “Yeah. That’s about it.” The engineer said, a little impressed that Gavin had picked the entirety of their transporter knowledge so quickly.
                Gavin closed his eyes, shook his head a little, and set about taker a closer look at the controls around the room.
 
                It was a little over two hours into Gavin’s investigations when Engineer Hoktark’s glassy footsteps announced her arrived in the transporter room, accompanied by Doctor Bequit and Captain Kuill.
                “I see you’re still here, then.” Captain Kuill announced with some relief. “It would’ve been embarrassing if you’d just up and left that quickly!”
                “It’s still pretty embarrassing.” Jich’slyr mumbled from the corner.
                “Why do you say that?” Engineer Hoktark enquired with interest. To the side of her, Doctor Bequit was creeping into the room.
                “The pipe valves.” Jich’slyr said, swallowing. “Turns out they’re not a whole lot to do with the transporter after all.”
                “But they’re in the transporter room! What else are they going to be for?”
                “A similar thing to the box of levers it turns out.” JIch’slyr continued, seemingly determined to skirt all the way around the point in the hopes that it would be forgotten about.
                “And that would be?” Captain Kuill asked, pressing for information. “Do they provide the self-cleaning seat function I asked about last week?” he speculated with sudden excitement.
                “No, sorry. The valves control the flow of water through the pipes. And the levers redirect those water flows between the ship’s engines, corridors, quarters, the bridge, and the outside.”
                “Damnit Jich’slyr I didn’t want a full technical breakdown, I don’t know what any of that means and you’re ugly!” Chief Engineer Hoktark cried, getting a little carried away. “What do levers do!?”
                “It’s the central bloody heating.” Gavin said from behind one of supposedly purposeless cabinets.
                “The centre of our ship is always piping hot. We have no need for central heating.” Captain Kuill said proudly. He wasn’t sure why a hot centre was important, but felt intuitively that it must be.
                “Not terribly surprising with how those valves and levers were being mucked about with all the time.”
                “Are you saying that our transporter system operation has been misleadingly carried out until now?” Engineer Hoktark asked urgently. “Misleading sales or reports are something I can work with quite well.”
                Gavin looked into her face and saw genuine interest and energy behind her eyes. He thought that she needed to get out more, but then realised that none of them could get out at all. Ever.
                “Yes, I am saying that. I’m saying that I think you’ve been turning on the transporter and then variously cutting off or restarting the flow of hot and cold coolant around the ship.  Then, you’ve been arbitrarily redirecting whatever flow there is or isn’t into specific rooms for no good reason. There will have been times when the engine wasn’t being cooled at all, and times when you’ve been pumping all of the heated coolant around the bridge instead of out to the heatsinks outside.”
                “You mean to say that those warm bridge days weren’t just nice space-weather?” Captain Kuill said, his jaw dropping open. In his words was a note of newly-discovered betrayal.
                “Space doesn’t have weather!” Gavin protested, irritated that he was having to explain this to people who had been in space much more than he had.
                “Well that IS a turn-up for the books.” The captain said with a chuckle. Engineer Hoktark nodded agreeably.
                Gavin was about to make a frustrated remark about the active resistance to learning about space that this crew must have adopted, when Doctor Bequit seized him from behind in another non-consensual hug.
                “You’re so smart!” the doctor said with over-flowing happiness. “I’ll bet you can fix loads of our problems!” He lifted Gavin off the floor and shook him gently from side to side. The bare human feet slapped into the nearest cabinet control a few times.
                “We can only hope.” Captain Kuill said.
                “So if the valves and the levers aren’t important, how does it actually work?” Engineer Hoktark asked, moving over to the pipework as if seeing it all for the first time. She guiltily ran her hands over their surfaces and the control systems, as if remembering the good times through the veil of uncovered lies. She was at least happy that it explained why her thermostat timer never seemed to work properly.
                “Hrnk.” Gavin replied.
                “Doctor, please.” Captain Kuill ordered gently. Doctor Bequit put Gavin back down and patted him on the head proudly.
                “I don’t know.” Gavin told Engineer Hoktark between panting breaths. Bequit’s hug hadn’t made much allowance for the requirement to breathe. “I’ve got a good enough understanding of plumbing to know that a hot water pipe doesn’t act as a teleporter, but these cabinets aren’t telling me much else. Your targeting stations are obvious enough, and the ‘on/off’ controller doesn’t have much else going on, so I suppose the answer must lie in these other two.”
                “Those things again?” Hoktark complained. “We’ve been over those so many times. They don’t do anything!”
                “I tried to tell him that.” Jich’slyr said “He wants to have a look though.”
                “They aren’t here for no reason. They must do something, and I’d be willing to bet that the control you’re missing must lie within the cabinets you’re not using.” Gavin said, phrasing the words as if they were wise rather than just an obvious statement of fact.
                “We have a casino if you want to do betting.” Captain Kuill jumped in. “It’s run by the chef outside of meal times.”
                “No. Thanks. I want to work out what these things do.”
                “Doesn’t sound like betting to me.” The captain said with the start of confusion.
                “That’s because it’s not.” Gavin replied. The glow of the cabinet’s display screen illuminated his face in a pale blue. Where the others had been adorned with friendly, helpful graphical representations of what they did, this one was just a wall of rapidly moving shapes and symbols. They might have been a language, or they might have been some kind of technical drawing. Or they might have been a screensaver. He just had no idea of where to even start thinking about it.
                “The buttons don’t do much.” Doctor Bequit told Gavin helpfully. “Look.” He reached over with one enormous hand and slapped at all of the buttons in one go. The shapes and symbols shifted, changed colour, and started to rotate slightly. Gavin felt that he and the doctor had very different ideas on what buttons ‘not doing much’ meant.
                “Best not press them again though, just to be on the safe side.” He diplomatically suggested.
                “The other duff one’s the same!” Bequit continued enthusiastically, running over to it. “I’ll press those instead.”
                “No, please!” Gavin said suddenly. “Please just let me try everything slowly, so that I don’t get overwhelmed.”
                The doctor considered Gavin’s request for a moment, and calmly stepped away from the second cabinet.
                “Alright. But if you do need them pressed…”
                “You’ll be the first to know.”
                The doctor’s smile beamed almost as wide as the room. Gavin feared another embrace, but thankfully Jich’slyr received this one instead on account of his proximity. There was an unpleasant squelching sound.
                “Also, could no-one please touch the aiming cabinets? At all. Even slightly. I want to leave the target right on my bed where it was, so that I can go back there.” Gavin said.
                “Once we’ve been paid.” Captain Kuill reminded.
                “And remembering that this is my transporter room, not yours.” Engineer Hoktark said, clattering one fragmented eyebrow upwards.
                Gavin sighed.
                “We’ll need to prove that I can get back before you can promise to return me. How about I teleport back down, then you beam me back up, and then you get paid and send me back down again, Captain? If you’re happy with that usage of your equipment, Hoktark?” Gavin suggested. It was a convoluted solution to a problem that didn’t need to exist, and he therefore thought that Kuill and Hoktark would lap it up.
                The captain pondered for a moment, counting off the journeys to and from the ship on his fingers to work out what the end result would be.
                “I think… does that mean you’ll… yeah, no… yes. Yes that’s fine!”
                “Marvellous.” Gavin said.
 
                Another few hours passed, and Gavin was no closer to cracking the mystery of the teleporter system. Both of the ignored cabinets, it seemed, had been cast aside for the reason of their complete impenetrability. Gavin tried comparing the strange symbols on their screen to the scant few signs around the ship and the buttons in the lift, and at least managed to establish that the language was the same, but given that he couldn’t read the strange alien alphabet it didn’t really help.
                Giving in to the temptation to press buttons, even without knowing their purpose, he had managed to change the colour, rotation, and font size of the symbols on the new display, but gleaned nothing else useful. The closer he looked, the less sense he could make of anything. There were no patterns he could find, and no words he could discern. It was starting to look like a bit of bust.
                Gavin sat heavily onto one of the stools and rested his head in his hands. He’d been up all night trying to work this out, on top of the already distressing fact that he’d been kidnapped by aliens, and it was exhausting. If only Sandra had been there, he thought to himself. She was brilliant at these kinds of visual perception problems, and had a pretty solid grasp of graphical interfaces. If either of them could navigate a menu devoid of clear instructions, it was her. Every time they’d bought a new television she’d been able to find a path through the murky backwaters of the settings menu to set up the aspect ratio, colour balance and tuning long before Gavin had been able to find which end of the remote to point at the screen.
                Even beyond her capacity for helping him to escape, Gavin wished she was here just for a hug. He was feeling a little guilty at blaming her in his own mind for the bright lights earlier. And for stealing the covers. She was innocent of both crimes, this time at least, and now he might never even get to see her again. He was stuck, and all because some inept pirates, who in fairness didn’t seem all the bad, were incapable of changing the direction of their transporter. They might never get to be together again.
                “Worked it out?” Captain Kuill asked. Gavin would have anticipated the question to be laced with sarcasm from anyone else, but the captain seemed to have such little awareness of reality that it was likely to be genuine.
                “No. No I haven’t. I was just thinking that my wife would be able to work it out though.”
                “Is she a ship’s chief engineer too?!” Engineer Hoktark asked excitedly. “We could compare notes and maybe learn how to make the drinks machines work properly.”
                “No, no she… what’s wrong with the drinks machines?”
                “They only ever dispense vegetable soup.”
                “That sounds like a fairly surmountable problem.” Gavin said dismissively.
                “Yeah, but we’ve never put any vegetable soup into it. Only Hellikan Soda. No matter how much soda we pour into every canister, it always comes out as vegetable soup.”
                “Oh… erm…” Gavin decided to snap back to the previous topic. “Anyway, no Sandra isn’t a ship’s engineer but she’s great with graphical problems. She’d crack this in no time.”
                “It’s a shame she isn’t here then. Maybe we could talk when she beams up the ransom money?” Captain Kuill suggested.
                “We’ve been through this. We can’t hear your demands or communicate back. Or get the money to you. I doubt that Sandra and I would even have enough money to pay my ransom. How much are you asking for?”
                “Standard rate. One million Federated Rupees.” Captain Kuill told him.
                “What the hell are Federated Rupees? We don’t have those. Why would you think we had those?”
                “They’re standard intergalactic currency. No fussing with planetary currencies or exchange rates, just one type of money for everyone.” Engineer Hoktark explained.
                “Except planets who aren’t in this federation because they haven’t work out the whole space travel thing.”
                “Yeah, except for them. But they’re the best ransom targets because they can’t come up and just take their prisoners back. Which, now that I think about it, wouldn’t be that bad because they’d have to find a way of getting us and the prisoner off the ship… oh well!”
                “So you only target planets who take any of the steps required to notice the kidnap, hear the demands, or pay off the ransom.”
                “Erm…” Captain Kuill thought for a moment. “Yes, yes that’s right. You’re a quick learner.” He added with a smile.
                Gavin looked back at his hands and tried to resist the urge to get drawn into another argument with the captain. Even if Sandra couldn’t fix the transporter, at least if she was around she would be capable of logical thought.
                “Look, regardless, Sandra can’t help because she isn’t here and she can’t communicate with us. But…” Gavin started to stare into middle distance, which was somewhere behind the screen facing him.
                “But indeed. Wise words.” Doctor Bequit agreed, not really knowing what was going on but happy to be coming along for the ride.
                “But she could be.” Gavin finished. “Why don’t we kidnap her as well! Then she can fix everything from here!”
                Captain Kuill frowned.
                “We’ve already got all the hostages we need. Taking two would be greedy.”
                “But you could get twice the ransom money!” Gavin persuaded, hoping that no-one else would realise that two times zero is still zero.
                “Hmm…” the captain pondered. He wasn’t a smart man, but he knew enough to work out that Gavin’s attitude to the ransoming system seemed to have changed in an extreme and sudden way. He felt like he was being manipulated, but couldn’t put a finger on why. “And you think that will work? You think all the communication and payment trouble you were talking about will be alright after all?”
                “If Sandra gets up here we would be able to make it work, yes.” Gavin promised optimistically.
                Captain Kuill narrowed his eyes. With so many of them, and their impressive height, this equated to one heck of a lot of narrowing.
                “It would be going against our established process… I mean we’ve not had two of any race before. The other crew might think it was a little unfair giving humanity the majority like that.”
                “It’ll only be temporary though won’t it, because we’ll be ransomed back to Earth and the crew can stay as one of each race. Everyone’s a winner.”
                A silence hung over the transporter room. Gavin held Captain Kuill’s gaze, and Captain Kuill held the hem of his shirt idly whilst thinking.
                “Alright, that sounds like a plan. We’ll bring up this superior second human to see what she can do.”
                “OK, perfect!” Gavin said happily. Hearing positivity come out of his mouth was a strange experience for everyone. “How well can you aim this transporter, Jich’slyr?”
                “Awfully. Not well at all. We found you by guesswork.”
                “Oh…” Gavin said, a little deflated. “Well, would you be able to move it very slightly?”
                “Not a chance. One touch and we’ll be somewhere else entirely. Honestly it’s a miracle I don’t knock it by accident and teleport up a chunk of the sea.”
                “I actually did that once.” Engineer Hoktark supported. “Took ages to get the room dry again.”
                Gavin looked between them both for a moment, shook away the thoughts, and continued.
                “Well that’s irritating. But it’s still pointed at my side of the bed. I don’t suppose you know if that’s close enough to beam her up? If she’s lying next to it I mean.”
                “Close enough? Ha! We don’t even know why it got you and not the roof of your home.” Chief Engineer Hoktark said with a chuckle.
                “Scrap that one then.” Gavin muttered to himself. He checked his watch. “OK, so it’s 5.30 a.m. Sandra will still be in bed for a while yet.”
                “5.30 a.m. local time, not Earth time.” Jich’slyr corrected.
                “I haven’t changed my watch since I went to bed.”
                “Exactly. It’ll be wrong.”
                “It was close enough!”
                “No, I mean time flows differently up here. We had to steal a lot of clocks to work that one out. The chef says it’s something to do with your relatives being a general.” Jich’slyr recalled.
                “Wh… how did stealing clocks help?”
                “Well we wanted one so we beamed one up. But then it never matched the planet’s time for very long. We kept thinking they were broken or running fast or something, but then they all worked the same once they were up here. It’s weird, but trust me. It’ll be a different time down there. Earlier than 5.30 a.m.”
                Gavin gave up trying to work out what Jich’slyr was talking about and thought about Sandra again. She’d be tucked up in bed, inches away from where she needed to be for their reunion. Maybe if she rolled over he’d have a chance but…
                It struck him.
                “It’s the middle of the night and I’m not in bed. Sandra will definitely be right onto my side, taking up the whole frigging thing.” Gavin said triumphantly. The others didn’t really grasp what he was talking about, but smiled politely anyway. ”Go! Beam her up now. Leave the target where it is and go!” He ordered urgently, by way of clarifying his previous statement.
                “This is my engineering room.” Engineer Hoktark said, bristling slightly.
                “With your permission then?” Gavin rephrased, with irritation in his voice.
                Engineer Hoktark pursed her glassy, fragmented lips and looked to the ceiling as if considering Gavin’s request.
                “Please?!”
                She looked him in the eye.
                “Fine. Jich’slyr, if you will.”
                Jich’slyr raced to the controls immediately upon receiving the order, and Doctor Bequit ran in tight circles in the corner of the room, unable to contain himself.
                “Firing up the transporter now, I think.” Jich’slyr said. There was a pause. “Complete, probably. She should be in the normal cell.”
                Gavin didn’t wait for his captors, instead rushing out of the door immediately and making his way back to the lift. Of course, he still didn’t know which button to press to take him back up to the bridge, so he had to wait for everyone else anyway.
                “Is Gavin on the hostage greeting committee now?” Hoktark asked urgently and not-quite-quietly-enough when they arrived. She shot him a sideways glance.
                “I suppose he must be.” Jich-slyr replied as he pressed one of the lift buttons. “All the crew’s there normally.”
                “But he’s still the prisoner.”
                “Well usually the previous prisoner is one of the crew by the time the next hostage is taken.” Captain Kuill thought out loud. “Is it possible that Gavin has joined the crew very quickly?”
                “I thought the point of kidnapping this Sandra creature was that we would have two hostages though.” Engineer Hoktark argued.
                “Maybe Gavin is crew and hostage now!” Doctor Bequit proposed. “He helped with the transporter so he has to be a little bit crew.”
                “The doctor makes an excellent point. We’ve never had a prisoner operate the transporter before so he must be a member of the crew now.” Captain Kuill agreed.
                “I still think we should treat him a little bit like a prisoner, just so we can get the ransom.” Engineer Hoktark suggested.
                “Sounds like a good idea. He can be like our pet!”
                “I will not be a slave!” Gavin protested. “I already told you that.”
                “That does sound a bit like slavery. We probably don’t want to go down that road.” Captain Kuill pondered.
                “Not a slave, just a member of the crew who we’ll eventually sell to a planet.” Engineer Hoktark clarified.
                Gavin narrowed his eyes at her, but made no further comment. It wasn’t worth it.
                A familiar translated ‘bing’ announced the arrival of the lift at its destination. Regardless of relative proportions to which Gavin was a crew member and prisoner, he led the way through the corridor and back onto the bridge. Given how long it had taken him to break out, he had been expecting to see Sandra running the other way in cold-footed confusion, but there was no sign of her. A brief instant of heavy emptiness hit his stomach with the possibility that she might not have been beamed up at all.
                “The door was unlocked. She should be here by now…” Gavin murmured.
                “Maybe she just has better manners about breaking out of cells than you do.” Captain Kuill jibed subtly.
                “No, I don’t think that would be the case” Gavin said, perfectly truthfully. “But maybe she’s still asleep or something.”
                Captain Kuill shrugged, and they all continued through the bridge.
                As the hostage greeting committee rounded the corner into the cell corridor they were greeted by the unmistakable sound of laughter.
                "Is that a scream?!" Doctor Bequit asked, mistaking it anyway to prove his individuality.
                "No. No that's Sandra." Gavin said, unable to resist the smile spreading involuntarily across his cheeks. It didn’t matter that he’d probably get a verbal lashing for helping to kidnap her onto an alien ship, nor the worse lashing he might get for waking her up in the process. He dashed down the corridor and swung around the doorway into the cell, remembering too late how wretchedly cold the floor was.
                “Hggnrk” he groaned, hopping one from foot to the other, but still the smile didn’t break.
                There she was, in all her pyjama'd glory, sitting on the edge of the metal table and chatting to the quadrupedal cleaner Gavin had met on the bridge. The translator balanced on her flowing, grey-streaked blonde hair suited her somehow. Hearing the commotion and picking up on frenzied movement in her periphery, she turned just in time to see Gavin cursing and gasping his way across the floor towards her.
                "Gavin! What are you doing here too?" She asked with curious suspicion, as if under the impression this might be a highly elaborate and badly timed surprise birthday party. Her birthday was 7 months away, so it would be a lot more planning than Gavin usually put in.
                “I was - ouch - I was kidnapped as well.” He answered, finally hopping up onto the table. “These aliens would like to ransom us back to Earth.”
                “Yes, Hajun here was just telling me that. These translators are good aren’t they?”
                “Yeah… shame about the shaving though.” Gavin said, wondering how upset Sandra would be about having a bald patch.
                “Shaving? What are you going on about.”
                “They have to shave a patch of your hair off to make good contact right? I was told that by doctor…” Gavin closed his eyes and resisted the urge to curse. Opening them again and looking at the door he saw Doctor Bequit waving happily.
                “Who are they expecting to buy us any?” Sandra continued, changing the subject back. 2The government?”
                “I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure they don’t either. They’ve sent a magnetic krypto-fax about it though, so it’s probably all in hand.”
                “And a message by Argon wave!” Doctor Bequit called from the doorway.
                “And that.”
                “Made some new friends, Gavin?” Sandra asked with a wry grin.
                “Sort of. I think they’re our colleagues now, technically. I get the impression we’ll be staying up here for a while.”
                “I see...” Sandra said, looking at the floor for a moment. “Well, it’ll be an adventure, won’t it? Seeing the stars certainly sounds more exciting than organising another portfolio. But who’s going to feed the cat?”
                “She’s pretty resourceful. Mrs Smith across the road always feeds her anyway, the mental old bag.”
                “We can send a hemispherical conduit broadcast about it?” Captain Kuill offered from behind the doctor. Hajun nodded to confirm that they could indeed do that.
                “Thanks captain.” Gavin said. He’d given up arguing the finer points of one-way messages.
                “This isn’t proper protocol for new hostages though, Gavin. We need to give her a tour of the bridge.”
                “Right. Yes. OK.” Gavin called back. “I think we need to go this way. Be careful though, the floor is incredibly cold. I’m not sure if I can withstand another trip across it just yet.” He said more quietly to Sandra.
                “I didn’t come hundreds of miles into space just to hear you complaining about another cold floor, Gavin Miller. I don’t know why you won’t just wear bed-socks like I do!” Sandra said without sympathy. Gavin looked down at her fluffy lavender socks and sighed.
                “It just feels wrong! And I didn’t know I was making a permanent footwear decision when I went to bed last night.” Gavin complained. He didn’t have much time to carry on though, because Doctor Bequit’s arms suddenly emerged around him in another excited embrace.
                “This way!” the doctor said warmly to Sandra, carrying Gavin back towards the door. He leaned his head close in to Gavin’s ear.
                “Looks like she’s already solved the cold floor problem. The transporter will be turned around in no time, right?” he whispered giddily.
                “Probably, Doctor. She’s good.” Gavin replied. But now that she was up here with him, being trapped really didn’t seem to matter at all.