Free Conquerors' Pride by Timothy Zahn Page A

waist trying to cool himself down. He slept a great deal, too, with strange dreams blending into the equally strange reality of his imprisonment and back again. Occasionally, he would wake up to find some of the aliens standing around him, poking or studying him with dull white instruments. But the memories were foggy. Perhaps they too were dreams. The fifth day he woke up to find himself healthy.

He lay there for a few minutes, running through a mental checklist and trying to decide whether he really believed it. But the discomfort and confusion were gone, and for the first time since landing he realized he was ravenously hungry.

Carefully, he sat up, aware that four days of dehydration could make him as light-headed as the sickness itself had. On his bed's pullout nightstand was a tall cylinder of some clear liquid and two of his escape pod's ration bars. The liquid proved to be a delicately scented water; the ration bars proved to be just what he needed.

He sat on the edge of his bed, looking around the room as he ate. Three aliens were visible, two of them working at one of the consoles, the third lying on what looked like a sort of stretched-out vaulting horse in the lounge area. None of them seemed to be paying all that much attention to him, but he somehow doubted he was being ignored.

Still, they were aliens; and any excessive sense of privacy he might have once had had been burned out by fifteen years in the Fleet. He finished his breakfast, stripped off his decidedly rancid jumpsuit, and stepped into the shower.

The standard Fleet-shower soap drip was missing, but with some experimentation he discovered that a bumpy section of wall near the shower head was a thick slab of some soapy substance. He scrubbed himself clean and shut off the water, remembering only then that there was no towel out there to dry off with. But that was okay. Simply being able to take a shower had made him feel like a civilized human being again, and if he had to walk around buck naked while he air-dried, it was a small price to pay.

He brushed off the excess water and stepped out. To his mild surprise he discovered that his old jumpsuit was gone, replaced by a new one that had been laid neatly across the bed. "Good maid service," he murmured. He walked across to it, glancing around the room as he did so-

And suddenly felt a surge of adrenaline jolt through him. There, off to his left, a vertical crack was visible in the wall of his cell. A vertical crack that bisected the milky-white lock mechanism set into the wall.

It was the edge of the door to his cell. And it was open.

He continued on to his bed, looking around quickly as he tried to kick his brain cells into activity. Could his captors really have left the door open when they brought in the fresh jumpsuit? No-surely they wouldn't have been that careless. It had to be a test of some sort. A test to see what he would do if they offered him a way to escape.

He sat down on the bed, picking up the jumpsuit and pretending to examine it. On the face of it the whole thing was so blatantly obvious as to be an insult to his intelligence. Here he was, barely recovered from four days of illness, imprisoned on an unknown world with nothing but the clothes they themselves had provided for him; and they expected him to jump at the first hint of a way out?

Or were they expecting a different reaction entirely? A reaction like charging out and trying to kill the aliens in the outer room?

His hand, he noticed suddenly, was dry where he was touching the jumpsuit: the material seemed to have wicked the water away from his skin. Possibly why they hadn't provided him with a towel in the first place. He started to get dressed, watching the aliens out of the corner of his eye as he did so. They were still just going about their business, completely oblivious to the open door.

All right,he told himself as he finished sealing the jumpsuit. It had to be a test, which meant that ignoring the door would