Last Stand (Stag Privateers Book 1)

steal my soul?”
An expression that could've been pain flashed briefly across the young man's features, before they became a blank mask once more. “No, not yours,” he said quietly.
Without another word he turned and disappeared through the door. Lana stared after him in complete mystification; she'd understood all the words he'd spoken, but without memories, she had no starting point to understand what he was talking about. Which he seemed to have deliberately made more obtuse by using metaphor.
Well on the bright side, if she hadn't understood the young man at least she seemed to understand why she hadn't.
Since everyone had run off Lana found herself alone in the galley, left to herself to find food. After a bit of scrounging she found some clean cups and got water from the sink, hoping it was safe but not letting that stop her from gulping down a few cupfuls. Then she turned to the storage lockers.
There were quite a few of them, and they held a lot of different things, including plates and utensils. But she finally found a few with food and poked around them until she came up with a shelf full of cans like the one Barix had been eating from.
Unfortunately, they had a paper taped to them that read: “This caviar is the property of Belix Ishiv, located with great difficulty and purchased at great expense. If you steal it, I will unsplice your DNA while you sleep and laugh as you dissolve into a puddle of protein strands. This means YOU, Barix!”
Lana stared at the note for a few minutes. Technically, it had been written specifically for the slight man she'd met earlier. But on the other hand, it didn't seem worth the risk of having whatever it was Belix had threatened happen to her, since it didn't seem pleasant.
In the end, she kept searching until she found another locker full of cans that contained little pink blobs of something called “processed meat”. Since this was technically the first time she'd ever eaten, she didn't know what tasted good or not. Even so, to her, the stuff in the can she picked out looked as unappetizing as the description sounded.
It turned out they tasted bland, too. That didn't stop Lana from wolfing them down, then hunting for another can of the same thing.
By that point, unsurprisingly, her other bodily needs had become too insistent to ignore. She hurried back down the corridor towards the facilities, wondering just how much time she was going to have to spend relieving one bodily need after another.
The facilities appeared to be a small room with four sinks and seven fully enclosed stalls: three toilets, one men's urinal and, separated by a partition, three stalls for washing. Two of those appeared to be sonic cleansing fields, while one, with a timer marked with a warning for fifteen minutes maximum limit, was an actual shower with a built-in water heater. There were also two machines against the wall for washing clothes.
To Lana's delight, over each sink was a mirror, giving her a chance to finally look at her reflection. In spite of her urgent bodily needs, she spent a few minutes staring at herself, tracing her fingers over her nose and lips and cheeks and chin, combing them through her hair, which fell down to her shoulders, and trying to make it look like Ali's had.
She could see that Barix hadn't in fact been lying or exaggerating; objectively speaking her lustrous reddish-blond hair, heart-shaped face, wide hazel eyes, high cheekbones, delicate nose, and full lips were all things people would consider attractive. She'd hoped that seeing herself would spur some memories, or at least provoke a sense of familiarity, but the face in the mirror was as much a stranger as anyone she'd met on the ship.
That unnerved her more than she'd expected. “Who are you?” she whispered, pressing her fingers to the mirror's cool surface.
There was no answer, of course. Maybe there never would be.
Turning away with a heavy sense of despondency, Lana slipped into one of the toilet stalls and took care of necessary bodily functions, the only pleasant thing about which was relieving the need to do them. The facilities appeared designed for zero-g use as well as in artificial gravity fields, and thankfully the toilet even cleansed her and flushed without her needing to do anything. But when she tried to go back out into the corridor a light beside the door flashed with an advisory to wash her hands.
Right. That's why the sinks were there. She hastily rinsed, even attempted to use soap from the dispensers, which she knew was part of the process but wasn't sure exactly how. After drying her hands with a machine that blew hot air she tentatively approached the door again, and was relieved when the warning light didn't flash again.
Part of her thought she should return to her room and check out the databanks, start learning what she needed to about this confusing universe she'd found herself in. But she hadn't really explored the ship at all, just gone to the places Ali had told her to. So she turned back towards the galley and, once there, went through one of the other doors.
This corridor was larger, maybe to allow machinery and cargo to be moved along it. There was also a curious warbling screech escaping out an open door halfway along it. Lana didn't know what it was, but it sounded like some sort of mechanical creature being horrifically tortured. It took a few seconds to recognize the rhythmic pattern as music, possibly, although nothing that seemed pleasant to listen to.
Torn between curiosity and a desire for self-preservation, she hesitantly crept towards the door. Just before reaching it she paused for a moment, building up her courage, then froze when she heard a feminine voice from inside uttering some of the foulest curses she'd ever heard.
Not that that was saying much.
“I'm a genius, I told him,” the unseen woman ranted.