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Angzal had met Congressmember Gord Ferrety upon his arrival from Mars two delays earlier , since her duties apparently now included a pickup service at the Malbur spaceport. It was, as Angzal had been told, one of the busiest spaceports on Earth, but coming back for the first time since herself arriving here by orbital shuttle a month earlier, she couldn’t get over how small it seemed. Passengers arrived mostly like herself – descending from the orbital transfer station where large vessels docked to avoid the costs and hassles of atmospheric entry. Ships that were capable of coming down to the surface were also present here, but none of the kind of traffic she was used to – places where one could look up into the sky and pretend they were at the centre of a swarm of insects.

It reminded her of the beach that was across the street from her office, and one that she’d sometimes come down to after a busy day of work. The waves there would break a few feet out into the water, white churn that agitated the sand splashing a few inches up her calf and maybe even up to her knee. And then there were the gentle waves that lapped against the sand, quietly sinking into it and then retreating. This is where she was, the planetary equivalent of the dampened sand at the furthest threshold where the water could touch, the rumble of the waves but a distant sound that hardly rose up over the background noise.

Gord Ferrety had neatly fit into her conception of Humanity’s place in the Known Reaches, arriving as one of a thousand passengers that were brought down in an orbital transport from the transfer station, stepping out of the gate with no entourage, and a single bag in tow. Meanwhile, the Mraboran ambassador travelled with a staff of seven on a surface-landing private vessel that was conspicuously absent from the planet at the moment, the Ambassador seeing fit to do her business from Mars for the time being.

Congressmember Ferrety spotted Angzal first, perhaps noting the one stationary Mraboran in a churning sea of Humans. This was her other complaint about Earth – for a capital planet, it sorely lacked for species other than its native one. As for Ferrety himself, she would not have pegged him for a politician. With loose fitting dark clothing, including an unseasonably warm jacket, and with his jet-black hair nearly coming down to his shoulders in an oily mop, he resembled more a petty thug than a member of the HID Congress. His long nose gave him the appearance of a bird, while his puckered mouth gave him the air of something aquatic, in others words, prey to the core.

“Deputy Consul Angzal gan Mreniyaur?” Ferrety asked, extending his hand in the traditional Human greeting. What was it with Humans and wanting to touch each other the second they just met? An unseemly tradition that made Angzal’s skin crawl very time she was forced to participate in it.

“Congressmember Ferrety. Please, ‘Angzal’ is just fine.”

“Oh, do call me ‘Gord’. This whole ‘Congressmember’ business feels too formal. I’m ‘Gord’ back home and ‘Gord’ here.”

As far as Angzal knew, Mars was no quiet backwater rock, by Human standards anyway. It was Earth’s oldest colony, and Gord Ferrety wasn’t even the only congressmember to represent the planet. Whatever face Congressmember Ferrety was trying to put on, Angzal figured she’d just play along.

“So, Gord, how was your trip?” Angzal asked as she led them to the chauffeured personal transport that the consulate had sent for them.

“Oh, it was fine,” Ferrety answered, hands in the pockets of his jacket. “I’ve made the trip so many times I hardly even notice it these days.”

“So have you lived your whole life on Mars?” She was speaking to Ferrety, but her eyes were flitting around the terminal, picking up on the wide-mouthed stares and the craned necks, realizing in a place like this, she might have actually been some of these people’s first Mraboran that they’d ever seen.

“No, I’m originally from a distant colony world that is now under the control of the Mraboran Protectorate.”

Seeming to catch the expression of concern on Angzal’s face, which was less out of sympathy and more out of worry that her history knowledge had missed this skirmish between the Humans and her own people, Ferrety continued, “Oh it was nothing like that, just some redrawn boundaries. Pure politics. But ever since, I’ve had a special place in my heart for all those periphery worlds that are so easily forgotten when you’re at the core of it all.”

And it was these periphery worlds and the few votes in Congress that they held that would need to carry the day for either side of this debate.

“Are you looking forward to this meeting with Congressmember Reyes?” Angzal asked, looking for someone to dread it together with since Rzena seemed to actually be looking forward to seeing the chaos that it might inflict on Angzal’s life.

“Well,” Congressmember Ferrety answered slowly, “I wouldn’t so much say that I’m looking forward to it, but I am hopeful.”

“You’ve met Congressmember Reyes before?”

Ferrety chuckled.

“You’d be surprised to know that Congressmember Reyes and I agree on many things. Unfortunately, we seem to have drifted apart on this one.”

They stepped out of the terminal and Ferrety stopped, looked up at the sky, and took a deep breath with his eyes closed.

“Ah, it never does get quite like this on a terraformed planet. How about you, Deputy Consul? What kind of world are you from?”

Angzal flared her own nostrils and found the aromas of home woefully lacking.

“I’ve pretty much spent my entire life on Mrabr.”

“Ha! Well, I bet Mrabr makes Earth look like Mars by comparison. Though I’d wager you’ve never seen anything like the Mer Pacific when you were growing up.”

“No, nothing quite like that.”
​
Now in the stuffy conference room with congressmembers Reyes and Ferrety going back and forth with each other, Angzal let her eyes wonder to the window and that body of water shimmering under the sun outside the consulate. Of course, this was only a bay, and even though she’d been here a month she still wasn’t sure if it technically opened into the Mer Pacific or one of Earth’s other oceans, but in any case even here the vastness of it was unmistakable. It was a great expanse of unknown that reminded Angzal of the blackness of space, and it must have built in early Humans an unquenchable thirst for exploration. With that kind of spirit, she wondered, what would have happened had their species not set themselves back by two millennia, right around the time of the Thorian Civil War when the Empire was at its weakest. Instead, they were now relegated to bickering in the periphery. She recalled the last conversation she had with Reyes and how Angzal had said that she herself enjoyed no privilege and merely gnawed at the scraps from the big table. But Reyes had been right, here is where the real fight for the scraps was taking place.

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One would think that with everyone now well fed, and on the Mraboran Protectorate’s dime to boot, the talks would resume in a more orderly fashion, but Congressmember Frances Reyes of Earth had different ideas.

“You do realize, Congressmember Ferrety, that it’s your children that would be sent to die in this conflict?” she asked before anyone even had a chance to settle back into their seats in the small conference room on one of the top floors of the consulate building.

Straight to dead children, Angzal thought; Reyes really didn’t have a pause button. Gord Ferrety, one of the members of the Human Interstellar Dependency Congress who represented Mars, did not skip a beat in the face of the sudden challenge.

“Yes, I realize the colonies have a more disproportionate uptake into the HID and ORC navies, but it’s due entirely to desperation. You’re citing the problem itself to undermine the solution to it.”

Problem. Solution. Got it. Angzal hoped that Rzena was taking better notes than she was.

This was the second day of the discussions between the two Human Congressmembers and Angzal’s final chance to prove herself and possibly avoid being shipped off to an even more remote and irrelevant rock, though such a bleak place was difficult to imagine. The Human Interstellar Dominion Congress was taking its vote tomorrow – on whether to approve both the intervention by the HID fleet, and by the fleet of the Outer Rim Confederacy which the Humans were a part of, in the current situation developing around Krevali, the pre-space-age world that the Thorian Empire recently conquered.

“And you’re the one proposing to douse flames with gasoline, thinking it’ll work just because it’s a liquid,” Reyes continued, and Angzal wished the Congressmember could sit in her chair for longer than a few seconds at a time. “If this blows up into another Last Gasp, and no one should be putting it past the Thorians, it could tie up our fleet for a decade. It would be our periphery worlds that would be most vulnerable to pirates filling that vacuum.”

“The pirates haven’t been a significant issue for years,” Congressmember Ferrety replied with a patience that seemed almost admirable to Angzal, “The continuing poverty and resource scarcity on the other hand …”

“Won’t be improved by this war no matter what you’ve led yourself to believe.”

“Don’t write this off as simple-minded belief, Congressmember.” Ferrety’s mouth, which seemed to have a constant pucker about it, took on the form of a pout whenever he was especially displeased with what Reyes was saying. “I know even for you it’s tempting to think of us colonists as simple-minded rockhoppers that need the wise citizens of Earth to tell us what’s good for us. But believe me when I say there’s a lot of sentiment out there that Earth needs to do more to make Human worlds more relevant in the Known Reaches, or they will continue to languish like irrelevant, well, ‘rocks’.”

He said this calmly, almost kindly, projecting the very model of the provincial politician, with nothing but love for his neighbours and boundless hospitality for strangers. Angzal wondered how much of this was an act.

“You’re from Mars, Ferrety. You can hardly describe yourself as being out in the boondocks. Only thing closer to Earth is Luna. And don’t think I’ve forgotten how much of our shipbuilding gets done on Mars. I’m sure this kind of foolish crusade would do wonders for your economy.”

Congressmember Ferrety’s puckered lips seemed to project themselves further from his face as he regarded Reyes with his small black eyes. He had surely known this accusation was coming; even Rzena was helpful enough to provide this background to Angzal ahead of time. But talking to Frances Reyes was like drinking from a fire hose – an overwhelmingly difficult task even if you were dying of thirst.

Reyes was one of the most vocal supporters of the non-interventionist position and by extension, despite being born and raised on Earth, was a great champion for the HID colonies, who generally preferred Earth stay out of interplanetary politics and stick to supporting its own worlds. Reyes advocated the idea that not only was it inappropriate for Humans, a race that were relative newcomers to space travel, to be involved in conflicts between other races, but also that it was incumbent on well-established and well-resourced races, like Angzal’s Mraboran, to act as the mediators, and where necessary, police.

Congressmember Ferrety of Mars, on the other hand, was a spokesperson for a relatively small group of HID colonies that believed a more proactive Earth would attract more economic interest from the Known Reaches to some of the HID’s periphery worlds. Between Reyes’ and Ferrety’s factions, the entire vote hung in the balance, and Angzal’s career along with it.

The Mraboran Ambassador’s instructions to Angzal were quite clear – facilitate the discussions between Reyes and Ferrety to ensure that the vote carries, that the Human and ORC fleets are dispatched to meddle in the situation around Krevali, and take any heat off the Mraboran themselves. They had been at these discussions for all of the previous day and also all of that morning, and with the vote looming tomorrow, Angzal’s tail pulled with anxiety at the leather bindings that kept it strapped close to her body.

“Every well-resourced older colony has some kind of hand in supplying ships for our space fleet, Congressmember,” Ferrety said, his fingers lying on top of the conference table while his thumbs dug impatiently into its side, “Surely you don’t mean to dismiss all of us due to these economic realities? The ships we end up building and providing crews for, once this is all over – they will return to patrol our own borders in greater numbers. We can ensure that HID and ORC sovereignty is defended, and anyone would have second thoughts about pushing us around, whether it be pirates, the Thorians, Hatvan or Mraboran.” He held Reyes’ gaze and after a few moments, turned towards Angzal and Rzena. “No offence meaning, of course.”

Angzal showed her right hand, palm up and with no visible claws, as a gesture of goodwill.

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Captain Pueson stepped away from the prisoner towards the corner of the room, forcing the other two to follow, and then asked in a hushed voice, “Is this true, Commander? Is it possible that our prisoner ensured that the explosive device in that crate did not come aboard the Forseti?”

Boro’s throat was still tight, and now it was dry to boot. “It’s within the realm of possibilities based on what we’ve seen,” he said acidly, “But there’s no reason why we should believe it.”

“What about the unexploded device?” Captain Pueson asked. “Could that be linked somehow?”

“Something to consider,” Boro answered in a strained voice.

“Doctor, has he always talked like this?” the Captain asked.

“He’s been going on like that since he regained consciousness yesterday,” Dr. Ory Sufai answered, her voice entering a higher register that did not reflect her age, “I’ve tried to ignore it, but that hasn’t stopped him.”

“Oh it’s so nice to hear the murmur of your voices.” The prisoner’s head lay flat and facing up, though his eyes were now closed. “It’s such a lovely song. Full of emotion and sorrow and love, an undeniable soul at the core of it all. A tender, real soul.”

His eyes remained closed as the three Forseti crewmembers returned to his bedside, the faintest smile on his face, something about it vaguely uncanny, as if the primitive stem at the core of Boro’s brain could sense that something was wrong with the creature on an unseen level.

“If you’re telling the truth, that you tried to save the ship,” Captain Pueson said, though if it were up to Boro, this ludicrous possibility would not even be entertained, “Then who was the one who tried to destroy it?”

“The other one, of course. She’s got no connection to us. That is, it’s her progenitor that doesn’t. Her progenitor and ours well, they don’t see eye to eye,” he smiled gently then, a completely unnerving gesture, “That’s between us though, it’s nothing you need to concern yourselves about.”

Captain Pueson’s large round face loomed over their nameless prisoner, his mouth opened slightly as it always did when the Captain’s mind was churning particularly thorny thoughts, but the expression in those mismatched green eyes remained placid, perceiving no danger and seeming to not even scratch the surface of the serious situation he found himself in. If it weren’t for the Captain and the Doctor, Boro would surely have been able to find a way to snap his attention back from whatever clouds it had found itself in. All Boro had at his disposal though were words.

“I think when our ship is almost destroyed that gives us plenty of reason to be concerned,” Boro said.

“Of course, I’m sorry. When all you hear is the whole of you, that beautiful mass that is you, it’s sometimes hard to remember the little pinpricks that come together.” The doctor silently pushed between Boro and Captain Pueson, and leaned in to raise the black arc of the medical scanner over the prisoner.

“What are you –” Boro began to ask but Dr. Sufai interrupted. “Just keep him talking.”

The prisoner didn’t seem to mind this, his green eyes briefly flitting to the scanner in curiosity and then turning back to Boro.

“I’m sorry about that young man,” the prisoner said, “I really am. I realize that life can be so fragile when you’re all alone. But, you should be safe now. We’re the only ones they sent. They thought it would be different this time. But as you can see, it wasn’t. I thought I could do it, but when I saw you there, when your voices emerged from the crowd and I finally lain my own two eyes upon your magnificence, I couldn’t do it. Not sure if my progenitor would be displeased or happy with that. But you get to continue and I think that counts for something, so that I may hear your beautiful song.”

Honeyed words, to be sure, but ones that gave Boro no comfort. He felt instead that continued sensation that they had somehow touched him, in ways that were not appropriate, and made him want to throw up. He stepped away and through the door to the main part of the medbay, with Captain Pueson and Dr. Sufai following.

“I don’t know about you, Captain,” Boro said lowering his head, in an attempt to signal to the Doctor that she was excluded from this part of the conversation, “But I’m not entirely reassured by those ravings.”

“I hear you Commander, but we’re well on our way and I don’t see how it would make a difference now one way or another.” Captain Pueson looked towards their prisoner, who was now contentedly staring up into the blackness of the scanner hanging over his head. “If there’s others like him out there, they’ll be hard-pressed to find us.”

“Unless the technology that lets them create that can also see right through our ghost.”

“Best not to worry yourself with that, I think, Boro.” The Captain, in one of his rare instances of first-name address, put his hand on Boro’s shoulder and gave it a slight shake. “Besides, a few months by himself in the brig, maybe he’ll change his mind about how much he’s willing to share. Doctor, I want him out of here and transferred into the brig as soon as you believe it appropriate.” They both then turned to the Doctor, who was regarding them with a cool even expression, her hands in front of her, the fingers of one wrapped around the thumb of the other. “Once he’s well enough, please contact Indario and they will provide the appropriate escort.”

Boro did not entirely believe that the Doctor would be willing to give their prisoner the proper bill of health when the time came, but still she answered with a “Yes, Captain,” and a nod that involved mostly her eyes.

“In the meantime,” the Captain continued, “See if you can uncover anything else about …” he paused, took a few steps towards the door of the prisoner’s room and asked, “Do you have a name, by any chance?
​
“A name? No, I don’t, or …,” the prisoner lifted his chin so he could look in Captain Pueson’s direction, “Not in the sense that you understand them, but if it helps, you may call me Isht.”

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Captain Timofie Pueson took his time getting down to medbay, arriving with a sidearm neural devastator gun – not the best aim though effective in closed quarters, and entirely unnecessary given the restraints the prisoner found himself in. Boro immediately had Dr. Sufai brief Pueson on her discovery.

“This is troubling,” the Captain said, staring at the image of the double helix like he could actually understand something within it, “If the Thorians or even the Hatvan have access to this kind of technology … there could be others like him anywhere.”

“Well, now we also have access to this technology,” Boro nodded in the direction of the prisoner’s room. “I’m sure it won’t take much to reverse engineer whatever has been done to him.”

The doctor shifted uneasily in her seat as he said this. Ory Sufai would clearly be of no help in this endeavour, but once they delivered the prisoner back into Human Interstellar Dominion hands, there might be some progress.

“No sense in wasting any more time,” the Captain said, “Doctor, are we able to see the prisoner now?”

“He’s conscious and restrained, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said and then followed them out of her office. Boro noted that she did not correct the Captain on his use of the word ‘prisoner’ as she led them to his holding room, and opened the door for them.

The fake Intelligence officer lay on the bed, his feet, hands and chest all held down, staring up into the ceiling, looking every bit disturbingly Human.

As they walked into his field of vision, he turned his head, his pale green eyes focusing, the larger one opening as if in surprise while the smaller one lagged behind.

“Ah, visitors,” he said, “And here I thought that the good doctor was the only one left aboard this ship.”

“We’re not visitors,” Boro corrected, lacking any interest in humoring another basket case, “This is Captain Timofie Pueson and I’m sure you know who I am.”

“Yes, Commander Stevin, of course. I hear you were very brave during the whole ordeal, you should be very proud of yourself. Though I’m sorry about the loss of that young man. He struck me as someone who would not pick a flower but admire it more than someone who would.”

“What?” Boro growled quietly in response. Reverse engineering be damned – best course of action was clearly to stuff him in an airlock.

Captain Pueson, before stepping closer to loom over the prisoner, shot his Second-in-Command a look but Boro ignored it. “We need to know who sent you,” the Captain said. “Who else knows about this mission?”

“Your eyes, Commander,” the prisoner continued, ignoring the Captain’s question. “They’re very dark. But the darkness there contained, is multitudinous.” That answer, combined with the look in those mismatched green eyes that made it seem like their prisoner wanted to reach out and gently caress Boro’s face was unsettling, so Boro stepped in with his own query. “What are you? We know you’re not Human, so what were you originally?”

“Captain. Captain Pueson. Captain Timofie Pueson. I can feel what you’re thinking. Not everything, not all of it, but some of it comes out, spills out of your mouth and your eyes, even your skin. When I’m this close, I can actually sense the pinprick that is you, among all the noise. Same with you, Commander, and you, Doctor.”

The words he spoke were disturbing enough in their own right, but it was something about the way he was speaking, so soothing and almost comforting, that it touched something inside Boro that he did not need anyone’s hands on. His throat tightened at this and the room started to feel too small.

“Stop avoiding our questions and spewing gibberish,” Boro warned, though somehow he knew that it wasn’t gibberish at all.

“I’m sorry, I’m just fascinated. My progenitor has certainly interacted with Humans before but my personal iteration has not.”

“Who is the ‘progenitor’?” The Captain asked and his voice seemed to quaver, more so than Boro thought it usually did. The Doctor just kept her distance and Boro wondered how many of these conversations she’d already had with the green-eyed alien. “Is the progenitor who sent you to destroy the Forseti?”

“Sent me to destroy? I guess …” the prisoner’s mismatched eyes unfocused for a second, one briefly staring off into an independent direction from the other, “I guess that’s why I was sent, but not what I was sent for.”

“Are you trying to deny that you and your co-conspirator tried to set off an explosive on our ship?” Boro asked, and almost took a step backwards when the prisoner turned his head in his direction and pointed those green eyes straight through him, his mouth slightly open in what looked like confusion.

“That’s not true though, is it, Commander? Surely you must have seen some security tapes. I was the one who saved the Forseti. Humans are our people, not like with that other one. I don’t know if she survived, but if she did, I recommend she not be allowed to do so for much longer. But in any case, I said too much already. Always with our progenitor, we have this problem, never anyone else it seems.”

Boro had of course seen the tapes, had watched on repeat that split second where he’d lost control, where the green-eyed fake Intelligence officer lunged for the controls of the crate and managed to reach them, because it was his dark-eyed partner that had been marked by the Parsk Nahur as the first to get shot. Boro had assumed that the reason the crate ended up lurching backwards into Tuka instead forwards into the Forseti, was because the prisoner had made an error. Boro was not ready though to consider that the words of the disguised alien were the truth and that the crate was launched away from the ship intentionally. Especially since Boro had not alluded to this potential version of events in any of his reports.

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I’ve found it difficult to find the right words to say.

I find silence just as hard to maintain.

I have made no secret about my opinion of the country I grew up in – the one my parents and grandparents were born. I consider it a fortuitous badge of honour that my family moved away three weeks before the man currently running Russia came to power. And I want to be clear, when I use the word ‘running’, I mean that he is running it into the ground.

There are few, if any, pairs of countries on this planet that are as interconnected through family as Russia and Ukraine are. This war of aggression is nothing short of fratricide, perpetuated by a man intent on carving his legacy using the blood of his people and the blood of the people closest to them. No matter what bald-faced lies are fed about the alleged noble intentions of a war that is laughably passed off as a war of liberation, this is nothing short of a crime against humanity.

There will be be forever etched into the history books something called the Russo-Ukrainian War – an abomination that should have never come to be. And I know that people around the world are horrified by the newest invasion but they won’t be truly able to appreciate the heaviness of this tragedy.

To me, the conflict would forever be defined by a question that would haunt me forever – the first words my mom said to me when we first spoke after the invasion had been declared: “How does it feel waking up an aggressor?”

How does it feel to wake up and once again be a part of a great people led to commit great harm by a seemingly ceaseless succession of evil men?

How does it feel to look in the mirror and see yourselves related to the bad guys?

There are no words that I can say that would properly convey how much I condemn this war, how much I condemn what we’re doing, because, make no mistake, it is still that ‘we’ that sits like a thorn in my heart.
​
There is a naïve hopeful part of me that believes this can kick off a chain of events that can turn the page to a new chapter in Russian history, and perhaps we will finally wake up and have something to be proud of.

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Boro found that in his experience, rules were not only the best prophylactic against chaos, but also one of its insidious causes. Where a complete lack of rules was a recipe for inevitable anarchy, a blind adherence to rules against all reason was an impediment to progress. And it seemed to him that no one fit that latter bill better than ship or station doctors. The Forseti’s doctor was no exception. Although the crew for a week now had in its custody a dangerous terrorist that attempted to destroy the ship, neither Boro, nor anyone else on the command staff had been able to gain any access to him.

The reason for this was Dr. Sufai; and the fact that of the survivors, the fake Intelligence officer had been closest to the blast and suffered greatly in the explosion. Shortly after his admittance to the medbay, Boro was informed that there would be no access to the prisoner, or as Sufai was sure to remind them at any opportunity, the patient, until he recovered sufficiently to be able to take visitors. When Boro explained that they would not be visitors, but rather, interrogators who needed to get to the bottom of who was behind the attempted sabotage of the mission and therefore, by extension, an attempt on the doctor’s own life, Dr. Sufai retorted that she wasn’t sure how that was any better and said that she would call them down when the time was right and not a minute sooner.

If it were up to him, Boro would make sure that every chief medical officer would have to spend a year in ship’s command before being handed their first doctor commission, in order to learn what it was like to make hard decisions in the face of Hippocratic obstinance.

A full week this charade of rules and procedures persisted, but now Boro had received the long-awaited call, and attended at the medbay himself.

“How is our prisoner doing?” he asked without pausing for greetings. His hands itched to get at this traitor, even though Boro knew he was forgetting himself.

“My patient is doing better, Commander,” Dr. Sufai said, walking out of her office and placing herself conveniently between Boro and the room where the prisoner was kept.

“I thought since he’s all better now he’s no longer your patient.” Boro meant this as a joke, but Dr. Sufai showed no intention of laughing.

“My patient is not fully recovered,” she said, “Once he is, you can move him to the brig and call him whatever you want. While he’s here, he’s a patient.”

“Well depending on how this goes, maybe he’ll stay a patient a while longer,” Boro said, cracking some knuckles on his left hand.

“Is this supposed to reassure me about allowing you to talk to him?” Again, he had said it in jest but the doctor chose to take him completely seriously.

“No, Ory,” Boro said while trying to soften his tone, “But it was intended to make me feel better about having aboard my ship someone who would betray his own kind.”

“Actually,” the doctor’s face changed – the severe brow smoothing, “That’s not entirely true.”

No, this was too much, Boro thought. He’d seen the tapes, he’d read the reports – no, he’d written the reports because he was there – there was nothing this medic could tell him about his understanding of the incident that would make him think he was wrong about the man’s intention. But, never minding all of that, he was going to remain professional.

“Which part?” Boro asked, jaw tight.

“The being Human part. He is … not entirely so.”

Boro wasn’t sure he quite heard right – there were so many headcases on this ship that seemed to want to mess with him for sport – but Dr. Sufai looked entirely genuine.

“What do you mean?” Boro asked cautiously.

“Come see this.” The doctor turned towards her office and Boro followed her in. “When he first arrived in here, his wounds were quite bad,” Dr. Sufai explained as she pulled up whatever she intended to show him on her computer. “The rate at which he healed though, well, it was unusual enough that it made me dig further. And here’s what I found.”

On the computer was displayed what appeared to be the stereotypical double helix of DNA, with several regions highlighted in bright blue.

“He’s Human on the outside, and as far as I can tell he’s Human on the inside. But looking deeper into his DNA, you could see there’s something that isn’t right. The DNA is, again, Human, but there are markers, dummy sequences that don’t do anything, everywhere where they don’t belong, and all sharing similarities that I can’t explain. It’s like someone had taken whatever DNA was there and rewritten it to be Human.”

“Who would have the technology to do something like this?”

“I don’t know, but I’m willing to guess not even the Thorians.”

Boro looked over his shoulder but there was no direct line of sight to their prisoner. “So what is he then?”
“Well that’s the thing, isn’t it? Really, he’s Human. It’s what he used to be that’s the real question.”

“Let’s see if I can get some answers, then.” Boro was nearly fully out the door of the doctor’s tiny office when he heard her say, “Uh, Commander?”

“Yes?”

“It’s required to have two people present at the interrogation.”

Not this again. There was an abom freak masquerading as a Human in their medbay in the middle of hostile territory and they were counting how many people were in the room with him.

“So? You’re welcome to join me.”

“I am joining you – the doctor also has to be present while the patient remains a patient, you need someone else.”

Incredible, it was like everyone on board this ship was hell-bent on getting killed except himself.
​
“I suppose the Captain would be willing to join us in a bit.” Captain Pueson was the last person Boro wanted down there – another slave to a rule book written by those without ambition, but including two officers without the Captain would have been bad optics.

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