Free Rebel Fleet by B. V. Larson

others looked at me then squinted in the silent glare coming from the rock. The light faded quickly.
    Nothing special happened for about a minute after that. At last, Dalton lost patience. He drew his tube back out and opened a sliding compartment. Inside was a syringe.
    He grunted with unhappiness. “What the bloody hell am I supposed to do with this?”
    “Stick it in your ass,” Samson suggested.
    “I’m a physician,” Dr. Chang said, “maybe I can be of help.”
    “Back off!” Dalton said. “Nobody is giving me a shot. I’ll do it myself.” He took the syringe out and plunged it into his arm. The thing morphed as he did so.
    “Oh shit! Get it off!”
    The syringe melted, shrinking, until it vanished.
    “Where did it go?” Samson asked.
    “It went inside me. It was a trick! That bastard Shaw... I think I’ve been poisoned.”
    “That seems unlikely,” Dr. Chang said. “Their technology is way beyond ours.”
    “You think so?” Dalton snarled.
    “Yes, clearly. What I think they did was present you with a normal-looking syringe in order to inform you as to appropriate usage—in this case, physical contact. Upon touching it with your flesh, it melted into your bloodstream.”
    “That’s bullshit… but… I can feel it in me. Something’s there. Makes me a little sick.”
    He looked a bit green. I opened my tube and found a roll of bandages inside. I wrapped them over my head as well as the puncture wound Dalton had given me. The injuries immediately began to feel better. Soon, the bandage disappeared.
    Samson got a tube of liquid, which he drank. Dr. Chang found several medical instruments. He was happy about that. He wanted to examine the rest of us.
    “Those instruments are for you, Doc,” I told him. “Try them on yourself.”
    He did, and they melted away too. He complained about this. “Doesn’t even make any sense.”
    “Maybe it does if you’re an alien,” said Gwen, “or a sym looking out of human eyes.”
    We all looked at her. She had taken her tube and retreated with it to stand in the doorway of her cell. I could tell now how she’d survived. She was more paranoid and sneaky than the rest of us combined.
    “Open it,” I told her.
    At last, she did. She laughed. She pulled a lovely purple blossom out of the tube. It was a Hawaiian flower.
    “I might as well make the aliens happy,” she said, and put the flower in her hair. It immediately sank into her scalp, healing the lumps on her head.
    She walked over to me and looked shy. “Sorry about trying to beat your brains out,” she said.
    “It’s okay. That was your sym at work.”
    “I guess so—but at the time, I really, really wanted to kill you.”
    “I believe it. How about now?”
    She shook her head no. “Hey, have you got any more of that bandage? My neck still hurts and my ribs are sore, too.”
    I looked at her side, where the papery cloth didn’t cover. I caught quite an eyeful, as we were all almost naked.
    “Um… I’m out of bandages,” I said. “Hey, I’ll catch you next time, OK?”
    “Sure.”
    I had to smile. Was she being nice for real, or just to soften me up for the next round? It was hard to tell, but it was impossible not to respond to her positively. She was a lovely girl.
    After we’d all retrieved our tubes and taken our medicine, the floor changed to yellow. I really did feel better, that was the strangest part. It was as if I’d slept a few nights and had several good meals. I was even able to open my right eye fully. It’d been swollen half shut up until now.
    “What’s next?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” Dr. Chang said, “but we’d better get back to our cells.”
    Gwen was already in hers, and the rest of us followed suit.
    “What’s happening?” I demanded of Samson and the others.
    “I don’t know,” the big guy admitted. “We didn’t get this far last time.”
    “Why not?”
    “We hit each other right here,” Dalton said. “Shaw said to socialize, remember?