Memory Transcription Subject: Lieutenant Kloviss, Arxur Medical Orderly, Seaglass Mineral Concern

  Date [standardized human time]: January 26, 2137

  Strategically, setting up the Arxur hab facility a twenty minute walk away from the spaceport had been a bright idea, and an excellent show of initiative on my part to prioritize operational security. But, since I wasn't currently seated in an officer's office boasting about why I deserved a commendation, it was also fair to say that having to make that walk four fucking times in one day was a pain in my ass, and, if I could go back in time, I'd have just set it up right next to the spaceport and rolled the fucking dice on us getting spotted.

  I was currently wrapping up trip number two, med bay back to hab, which would lead cleanly into trip number three, hab to med bay again, but with an armful of drinkable meat this time to help our garrison’s resident bullet magnet get his strength back up. This came pre-packaged with its own puzzle: figure out what the fuck ‘drinkable meat’ was. Doctor Tika had mentioned the words ‘soup’ and ‘broth’, both of which translated just fine into my language, but I’d never actually heard an Arxur say them. Sounded pre-war. Troublesome. Still, not the first time I'd heard it through the translator, at least: one of the humans I’d worked with back on Earth had mentioned broth. Birria, the dish made from slow-cooked goat, tended to be served with a side of broth. I’d even tried it. Some… hot and salty health tonic brewed from bones and herbs. I probably had a recipe somewhere or other…

  I threw the door to the hab facility open, and tried not to flinch too hard at the unsettling cacophony coming from the common room. That one sergeant was still going at it. Really showing his fancy new steel drum the meaning of violence as performed with a tiny wooden hammer. I gritted my teeth and forced my way past him to the kitchen. I dropped my holopad on the counter to reference my notes while I looked around for tools and ingredients. I paused, staring in awe at the sight of an overstuffed pantry. I allowed myself a small grin. That was the kind of abundance that was going to look magical to me for a while longer, still. I grabbed a bag of chicharrones--pork rinds, I think, was the generic term--to snack on while I got everything else together.

  “Tough cut of meat with lots of bone and cartilage,” I read off, grabbing a few gristly beef shins and oxtails. Not very filling, but fun to gnaw on. “Check. Salt…” That was one of the few seasonings we used on our own. Lightly salted slivers of fresh Venlil heart were a high-class delicacy. Had it once. It was okay. “Check,” I said aloud, pulling the salt canister off the shelf.

  “Spices…” I snorted derisively. The birria broth had tasted delicious, but I’d been one of a bare handful of Arxur bold enough to try it. Too many weird plants in human food. Even with the supply drops from the U.N., we weren’t stocking any Terran vegetables. That would have been a laugh, watching a human try to convince an Arxur quartermaster about the importance of stocking peppers and onions to go with all the sausages. Pfft. There was one little thing in the back that we’d accepted, though… Some funky concoction made from the fluid runoff of fermented sea creatures. Fish sauce, they’d called it. Better than salt alone, probably. “Check.”

  That was about it for ingredients, aside from potable water, which we had no shortage of. Put it all in… I squinted in confusion at the fact that we even owned a cookpot. But there it was in the cabinets, next to the knives and cleavers, plain as day. That was a human tool, or maybe even a prey one. Must have gotten mixed in at some point. My illustrious species preferred our food raw. Nevertheless, however it had gotten there, there was our cookpot. Handy.

  With my tools and ingredients at the ready, I started down the instructions. “Step one, brown the meat…” My lip curled up in disgust. Humans and their love of fire. Honestly, they were more obsessed with burnt flesh than the average Federation Exterminator. “Fine, I’ll just… heat the cookpot up without the water for a bit. Let the hot metal work its magic. Steps two through…” I rolled my eyes as I skimmed all the way down. “Throw the salt and seasonings in, and boil it for hours, basically. Who the fuck’s got hours to kill?”

  I flinched as another barrage of atonal clanging came after me from the common room. But this time, I grinned a bit widely and wickedly. That was the beautiful sound of a fellow with too much time on his hands. Best of all, I outranked him!

  I stuck my head out of the kitchen. “Hey, Sergeant!” I called out.

  The more average-sized Arxur put his musical instrument down and turned to acknowledge me. “Need something, sir?”

  I scratched my jawline idly, as I tried to figure out what, specifically, I wanted. I nodded to the steel drum he'd been banging on. “You pick that thing out on a whim, or you got a knack for metalwork?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Hull patches, spot welding… all the basic stuff to keep a ship in one piece. Why do you ask?”

  Even if I put this guy in charge of watching the pot boil, I think Kitzz needed something to eat a lot sooner than several hours from now. Had to speed things up. I didn’t have schematics, but I had a picture and a name of a tool called a pressure cooker. “Ya think you could put an airtight seal on a cookpot?”

  The sergeant tilted his head back as he thought about it. “Yeah, I think so? Sure, lemme go grab my tools.”

  I grinned and nodded. Now there was the sweet sound of a plan coming together. This was gonna be way faster than boiling…

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  Memory Transcription Subject: Deputy Security Director Garruga, Seaglass Mineral Concern

  Date [standardized human time]: January 26, 2137

  I was curled up on my bed drinking fruit juice from a pouch with a straw. With Doctor Wylla back on duty, she was able to assess that my legs were healing well enough that I no longer needed to keep the casts elevated, and with Kloviss gone, she was also able to leave the supply closet to talk.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  “I don't know what possessed you!” Doctor Wylla shouted at Doctor Tika, stamping her left hoof. Nevoks. So strange, working with a hooved species of bipeds, but hey, they paid just as well as their four-hooved rivals, the Fissans. “It's bad enough having the injured one tied to the bed, but a free and healthy Arxur? Working here!?”

  Doctor Tika flicked an ear noncommittally. “You saw his performance with Garruga,” said the little Zurulian. “Well, heard it, at least. Or did you? Hrm. Well, even through the supply closet door, surely the silence was noteworthy. No screaming, no new injuries on Garruga or myself.”

  “Just because he went a few minutes without killing anyone doesn't mean he can make it through a whole shift without lashing out!” Wylla protested.

  Tika nodded. “I see. How many minutes would suffice to demonstrate that, then?”

  Wylla's eye twitched, and her mouth worked silently. “What?” she said at last.

  Tika licked at her paws. “It's a basic question of statistics and probability,” she said. “You think there's a 100% chance that Kloviss will kill us, but he just made it through an entire conversation without killing anyone. How many minutes, hours, or days of nonviolence will it take to lower your estimation of those odds to, say, 50-50 odds of killing us?”

  “Ancestors spare me, there aren't any!” Wylla shouted, stamping her hoof harder. It was starting to make a gratingly loud clopping noise against the floor. “The Arxur exist to kill. Just because he hasn't yet doesn't mean he won't; it just means he's up to something!”

  Tika brushed her paw across her head, smoothing the tousled fur there. “Surely there must be some amount of contradictory data that will force you to reevaluate even otherwise bedrock-stable theories. Gravity fails under specific circumstances, thus we have antigravity thrusters. If Arxur bloodlust also fails under specific circumstances, then recreating those circumstances can lead to stable Arxur employees.”

  “There are still conclusions that are not reasonable to draw!” Wylla shouted. “If you shoot at me, and your gun misfires fifty times in a row, the sensible conclusion is that I've gotten insanely lucky, not that I'm immune to bullets!”

  “Or it means the weapon’s design has an exploitable flaw,” said Tika. She idly wandered over towards my bedside as she spoke, making a note of my vitals. “Perhaps it's raining, and the gun can't fire when wet.”

  I kept drinking my juice and watched the esteemed experts hash it out. They knew more than I did, which made the debate somewhat educational. Wylla was retreading the common wisdom that I generally agreed with, but Tika was making some unusually astute points against that orthodoxy. Of course, it was much easier to examine the topic of the Arxur with a level head when one wasn't staring at you.

  Wylla’s head hit the nearby counter with an audible thump. “What are you proposing, then, Doctor?” she muttered into the countertop.

  Tika gave another noncommittal ear flick as she jotted my vitals down into our medical records. “I'm proposing that predators, assuming their bloodlust is kept slaked, and assuming further the presence of a system of deterrent-based rules of conduct--threats of repercussions for violent misbehavior, for example--under such circumstances, I suspect even an Arxur might be able to function as a productive member of society.”

  Wylla sighed in exhaustion at Tika. “Well, you're the expert, I suppose. If you really think it's a good idea to dance this close to an open maw, on your head be it.”

  Tika trotted along the counter over towards the other patient to check his vitals as well. “Don't worry too much,” she said, examining the sleeping Arxur. “My head’s never been safer.”

  The not-quite sleeping Arxur's lunge missed Tika’s head by inches.

  Wylla screamed, and I choked on my juice. That fucking idiot Kloviss left the patient’s maw unrestrained! Spirit guide me, if even a single one of the other restraints had failed, we’d be down a doctor right now!

  “Gyah!” said Tika, taking a few steps back from the patient’s face. She swatted the Arxur’s knee. “Don’t startle me like that!”

  Kitzz glared at Tika and roared, baring his teeth menacingly. Tika planted herself on all fours, bared her teeth right back and hissed. Her fur even bristled up like a… like a… fuck, I’d been away from home for too long. The little angry arboreal predators from Grenalka. What were those called, again? Treesnappers! “I said,” Tika growled. “Don’t do that!”

  “What the fuck?” Kitzz and I both muttered in baffled unison. His maw swung around as he recognized me. He growled at me. Without even thinking, I let my rage take the wheel, and I growled right back.

  Kitzz shook his head, groaning. “Fucking… ass-backwards planet. The prey don’t even work right.” His eyes locked onto Doctor Wylla, ready to try three for three. “Blood,” he muttered hungrily.

  “You… you can’t have any!” Wylla stammered, trying to be brave, and only failing a little bit. She didn’t hide in the closet this time, but she wasn’t getting any closer to the Arxur patient, either. In fact, she seemed to mostly be trying to keep me in between the two of us. Not a bad idea, if I’d been healthy and armed, but as a patient, it felt like she was sacrificing me to save herself…

  Kitzz’s eyes drifted upwards from Wylla and I, settling on a spot maybe a foot or two above my head. My… my IV fluids bag? No, wait, the blood transfusion bag! His eyes flicked back down to the little pouch with a straw in it that I was drinking juice out of. “Blood,” he repeated. “You have extra. Bring me one, and you can keep yours. For now.”

  “Oh!” said Tika, tapping her paws together in excited realization. “Yes, of course! One of the spare blood transfusion bags. That should tide you over for a bit until Kloviss comes back with your breakfast. Very clever!”

  Kitzz glared at her, and grunted noncommittally as she fetched a spare blood bag out of cold storage and warmed it up for a wildly unconventional use.

  I kept my eye on Kitzz to make sure he didn’t try anything to the doctors, and he kept his eyes on me, suspicious of what someone my size could do to him if he was restrained, and I wasn’t afraid of him. I drank my pouch of frostberry juice. He drank his pouch of Nevok blood. They were both an unpleasantly similar shade of blue…

  When Kloviss finally returned, he was carrying a container of disgusting flesh soup as requested, but he also reeked of it, like he'd been completely splattered in the putrid liquid. It was that sickening smell of burnt death that you got, not from decay, but from Exterminator work. His gray scales had gone reddish and were peeling off in places like a badly sunburned Takkan. Even Doctor Wylla was too startled by the state of him to be startled at the sight of him.

  “Ancestors spare me, what happened to you?!” she squeaked out. “Why are you covered in hot soup and first-degree burns?!”

  Kloviss dropped the vile soup container near Kitzz, who sniffed at it curiously, even as he smirked at Kloviss’s misfortune. “I successfully reverse-engineered bone broth, as well as a tool called a pressure cooker,” said Kloviss, in a dry military tone. “The prototype was successful. I’ll need to borrow a few spare parts for the next iteration.”

  “Such as?” Doctor Wylla asked, tentatively.

  “A pressure release valve, for starters,” said Kloviss, helping himself to an open seat and a squeeze bottle of burn ointment.