Maureen looked around at the aliens held in this compartment. When she had first arrived she’d have been taken aback by the strange men and women. But now? Now she took it in stride.
She walked to the woman and felt her head. She was warm but not hot. Her pulse seemed steady and her breathing was not labored. But something had set her on a bad path.
“Who put her here?” she asked, turning to the others.
“I did,” a voice said from across the room.
It belonged to a tall male. His bright silver eyes shone in the dim light, set off and made to look even brighter by his cobalt-blue skin and deep-gray hair. He was wearing a light shirt that did little to cover the bulk of his muscles, his arms exposed, showing the sweeping lines of the tattoos everyone on this ship seemed to have.
His were different though. Scars in several places interrupted the lines, the healed flesh blending in with the rest of his hairless body, the broken trails of ink the only signs of damage.
Maureen sized him up in a glance, noting his imposing height and mass as well as the considerable bulge in his trousers she couldn’t help but notice. She felt a hot flush rise to her cheeks and chided herself for it. She didn’t mean to scope out his package like that, but it was kind of hard to miss given the material barely containing it.
“You did good,” she said, forcing her brain back to the situation at hand. “What happened to her?”
The other aliens looked at one another and shrugged, not wanting to deal with a human. The impossibly sexy alien man seemed to have no such compunction, given he was the one who had stepped up to help the poor woman.
“She was deposited in our compartment just a day ago,” he said.
“And her health? Her overall condition?” Maureen pressed.
“She appeared to be in fine shape.”
Maureen felt her forehead again and checked her pulse. Her heart rate was perhaps a little fast, but she didn’t have signs of a fever or infection. Maureen lifted the woman’s skirt and examined her as best she could. There was no sense in modesty now. Not here. Not when they could all be killed at any time.
The deep-blue alien leaned in, looking with clinical interest. Maureen nearly snapped at him but saw his gaze was purely one of curiosity. No sign of masculine lechery was present.
“Thoughts?” she found herself asking, at a loss herself.
“Smaller than women of my race, but she appears to be quite similar in physiology. I do not see any signs of premature birth, though I do not know how long your kind gestate.”
“No, not about that. About what might have caused her to go down like this. Think. Was there anything unusual that happened?”
“Nothing. We welcomed her—”
“Speak for yourself,” an orange-skinned creature with thick hair covering most of its body said. “Wasn’t me. I didn’t touch her.”
“None of us touched her,” the alien shot back.
“There has to be something. Anything.”
The blue man shook his head. “Truly, there was nothing. She joined us, drank the same water, ate the same food—”
“Hang on,” Maureen interrupted. “What color?”
“What color,what?”
“The food. What color was it?”
“The orange variety. I don’t see why that—”
Maureen began opening the woman’s clothes, scouring her body. “Shit. That’s the one that doesn’t sit well with some people. If she’s having an allergic reaction—there!” she exclaimed, uncovering a rash on the woman’s chest that spread to her flanks. “She’s breathing okay, but whatever was in that food, I’d bet it triggered some sort of food allergy.”
“Is there anything we can do?” the man asked.
“I really don’t know. It’s like a histamine reaction, making parts of her body get inflamed.”
“I do not know what a histamine reaction is, but the rest makes sense. You are saying her body is fighting itself, if I understand correctly.”
