There were about thirty of them, but many had little ratlings clinging to their pelts or garment loops. Most wore shapeless grey or dun smocks, but a few looked as though they had basked in the great Dr. Rat’s reflected glory, their elaborate clothes tricked out in stiff and pointlessly space-filling pleats and folds. They were all festooned with sling bags and packs, each of them carrying their own body weight in bric-a-brac and nonsense, as though they were setting up an impromptu car boot sale in the bomb bay. Lee wanted to laugh, and then something flipped in her mind and she felt disgusted by her own anthropocentrism. The comical posturing of Dr. Rat, the hilariously overladen rodents turning up like a bad cliché in a farce…except it was none of it funny. Dr. Rat was desperate. His “precious valuables” were his family, whom he needed to get out of danger, and who knew what persecutions and horrors went on in this place? They were refugees—and they were willing to throw themselves on the mercy of a different species, from another world, on the wager that it was better than whatever life they had here.

“We have to help them,” she said to Mal, who gave her a somewhat wild look.

“Good luck with that,” was her answer, but she nodded. Lee squeezed her hand, knowing her friend would do whatever was in her power. “But first,” Mal declared, “Dr. Rat, we need to retrieve Dr. Khan, in a way that’s not going to get us caught and dissected.”

Dr. Rat seemed to find no hyperbole in that statement. “Vivisection is by far the more probable outcome,” the translator noted crisply; and Lee could have done without the candour. “Owing to superior planning, measures are in place for extraction of your co-specific. This onerous task falls to the pre-eminent Dr. Rat—to abstract fellow scholar Dr. Kay from her location and convey her herewith.”

“Uh,” Mal said, “any chance of conveying her somewhere that isn’t filled with explosives? Only…”

“No hostilities are anticipated in the immediate future, absent unheralded unrest in the conurbation beneath,” the translator failed to reassure them. “Sufficient difficulty will be encountered in the conveyance of my learned colleague, Dr. Khan. The transport of two additional giant extradimensionals would interpose a needless logistical barrier. Also, the majority of locales within this vessel do not readily admit organisms of your proportions.”

They turned the words over until the meaning fell out.

“I guess we’re lucky we turned up without our heads stuck in the ceiling,” Lee said soberly.