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

  Date [standardized human time]: January 26, 2137

  Around the time Kloviss was finished applying it to his face, Doctor Tika clambered over onto his lap and quickly took over the task of rubbing burn ointment onto his chest. I couldn’t fathom Tika’s thought process. It would have taken no effort at all for the Arxur man to just grab her in one claw and toss her whole into his open maw, and she just seemed to have unshakeable faith that he wouldn’t. Faith that seemed to be paying off, granted. Kloviss winced slightly as Tika touched some of the angrier spots, but he seemed fairly relaxed on the whole. Happy to be sitting, and happy to have someone with soft fur touching him. Spirit guide me, if I didn’t know any better, Tika almost looked like she was enjoying herself. Probably because she seemed able to ignore the worst horrors of sitting on an Arxur’s lap. I squinted, trying to focus on Kloviss from the neck down. With my eyelids blocking out the horrible maw, that wasn’t a bad set of pecs for a biped…

  I shuddered, and shook my head hard enough to jostle those thoughts loose.

  “The fuck is going on?” Kitzz growled. “You. What’s your name and rank?”

  “Kloviss and First Lieutenant,” said our new orderly, dryly. He started idly petting Tika’s fur without really noticing he was doing it. Did he just do that with everybody? “Pretty sure that puts me at third in command on this mission, Ensign.”

  Kitzz snorted derisively. “Congratulations. Want me to suck your fucking dick over it?” He spat, leaving a bluish stain on his bedsheets from the Nevok blood he’d been drinking. “What’s the fucking mission, dipshit?”

  Kloviss sighed, exhausted already. “Right. You’ve been unconscious since the fight on the tarmac. Cool. Okay. So. We’re in charge of this outpost, but we’re doing some kinda weird human-style vassal-state thing. They resupply our ships, we help them out here and there with their whatever little problems, everybody’s happy for once.” He tousled the fur on Tika’s head. “I don’t entirely get it, but Commander Sifal seems pretty passionate about it, and it seems to be working so far. I’m not a big fan of fixing things that aren’t broken.”

  Kitzz squinted in confusion. “So… what, they’re our fuckin’ slaves?”

  Kloviss shrugged. “Doesn’t seem like it. More symbiotic than predatory, Prophet spare me, at least for now.”

  Kitzz looked utterly revolted. “We’re trading with them? We’re not just taking what’s rightfully ours?”

  Kloviss chuckled dryly. “I mean, apparently it’s way less fucking work? I didn’t have to chase anybody down. I just carried that donkey over there to the bathroom and back, and I’m already getting doted on.” Tika was making herself comfortable on his lap for the moment, but he nodded towards me as he spoke. What the fuck was a donkey?

  Kitzz growled. “That’s obscene! The prey are less than us. Putting them in their place is its own reward.”

  Kloviss snorted, and nodded towards me again. “I mean, I quite literally put her in her place. Apparently these guys have a surprising number of problems that boil down to an inability to haul around 300 kilos at a go. Real easy fix, that.”

  A loud slurping noise escaped from my juice bag as I jolted up in offended shock. “I do not weigh 300 kilograms!” I coughed out.

  Kloviss’s eyes flicked around the med bay quickly, searching, before glancing back at me. “Looks like we have a scale,” he said wryly. “Well within my duties to weigh you, if you want to take that bet.”

  “This is all fucking absurd,” said Kitzz, baring his teeth. “You’re weak, and I’m going to supplant you.”

  Kloviss’s eyes flicked back towards Kitzz, and he sat up straight, muscles tensing. Arxur were the tallest species in the known galaxy, when they weren’t slouching or lounging, and Kloviss was taller than most. And his glare could have peeled paint. “I’m reserving my strength for little shits like you. Wanna see how well I can put somebody in their place?”

  Kitzz let out an unexpected sigh of relief, then grinned wickedly. “Finally, some fuckin’ normality! Alright, so what’s the actual day-to-day, officer?” The patient, still bound up in medical restraints from the neck down, seemed to relax a little. What the fuck? He was… more in line with what kind of behavior I’d expected to see from an Arxur, but laid against the backdrop of Kloviss, Kitzz’s personality was giving me whiplash. Right? Kloviss… if I were half-blind, half-deaf, and half-witted, I could maybe pretend that he was an old, gruff Takkan who’d seen a little too much shit on the battlefield to fit in with the herd anymore. Kitzz? Kitzz was just an Arxur. And he acted like he wanted everyone to know it.

  Kloviss sighed. “No killing or harming the prey without the Commander’s say-so,” he started.

  Kitzz snorted. “That’s stupid. What if one of them pulls a gun on me?”

  “I mean, that evidently isn’t enough to drop you,” Kloviss said, rolling his eyes. “Just use minimal force. Grab the gun away and smack ‘em like a naughty hatchling or something.”

  Kitzz grunted noncommittally.

  “Oh, and no traumatizing them so badly it causes the Commander problems,” Kloviss added. “They can’t fix our ships for us if they’re huddled in the corner pissing themselves.”

  Another noncommittal grunt from Kitzz.

  “Aside from that?” Kloviss shrugged. “I dunno. We’re on shore leave, more or less, but not off-duty. Find something to do. Word is, you’re a doctor…?”

  “Surgeon.” Kitzz’s grin widened wickedly. “It’s a lot like butchery, but then you have to put them back together again.”

  “Okay, see? Vaguely ominous, you’re probably fine,” said Kloviss. “Just keep a level head and a cool temper.”

  Kitzz snorted. “Yeah, I’ll get right on that, officer,” he said with a smirk.

  “Well I, for one, am looking forward to working with you, Doctor Kitzz!” Tika perked up cheerfully, choosing as usual to willfully ignore any sarcasm that she didn’t feel like hearing. “Maybe we can do some technology swaps! None of us know how to render medical care to an Arxur, and we may have outpaced you in the past few centuries in medical advancements.”

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  Kitzz froze, and his eyes narrowed. “The fuck you did,” he said, icily.

  My head perked up in confusion. Only four words, but something was deeply off about how he said that. What was that tone in his voice? Pride in his species? No… No, this was slightly different. What the fuck was it?

  Tika soldiered on regardless. “Well, the Federation looks out for the herd. The Arxur, as I understand it, are far more solitary. It stands to reason that an individualistic society wouldn’t prioritize medical care as strongly as a more social and communal society like ours.”

  Kitzz’s eye twitched. “We’re smarter than you,” he growled. “We’re better than you.”

  We, the Arxur? No, he didn’t quite sound like he was including Kloviss in his cohort. Whose honor was he defending here? Why did it sound familiar? Deep in my throat, I almost growled as I forced myself to make sense of it. Across the widest possible species divide--mammal to reptile, quadruped to biped, and, most of all, noble herbivore to monstrous carnivore--I wracked my brain for a shared experience… and, to my horror, I found it. I knew this kind of pride. I’d voiced this kind of pride the first time I’d worked off-world, back at that prick-filled Exterminator’s office on Talsk…

  My eyes went wide. It was Kitzz’s pride as a doctor. That was professional pride! He didn’t give a shit about other Arxur, but he was visibly shaking with rage at the mere suggestion that another doctor might know more than he did.

  Tika’s head tilted in confusion, unaware of the danger she was in. “But there must be a thousand of us for every one of you.” She sounded polite, and utterly neutral. She wasn’t arguing, just stating known facts, same as if she were talking about her blood being green, or Kitzz’s red. “Research isn’t a game of miles, it’s a game of inches. The more people you have working on a problem, the faster it’s solved. Regardless of any flaws in our approach, the Federation might have more medical researchers than the entire population of your species. Surely that must give us an advantage.”

  Kitzz smiled, but he didn’t actually look all that happy. Pretty far from it. “Very interesting point. I’ll take that into consideration. In the meantime… I can’t really eat my breakfast with my hands tied up like this.” He nodded, vaguely, towards the container of soup. But vaguely enough that, even with my shitty depth perception, I could tell that he could have been nodding at Tika instead. “Would you mind untying me, Lieutenant? Just an arm will do.”

  With eyes unclouded by hate, I could see the predatory deception plain as day. Fuck, had the Arxur always been this obvious? His body language was childish once you knew what to look for! His left arm, the one nearest the soup--and Tika!--was twitching with anticipation, and yet his binocular eyes were target-locked on the chair with her and Kloviss, not the countertop with the ready-made food. Spirit guide me, it was like a foal staring at a sweet, waiting for his chance to leap for it!

  Kloviss rose to release his fellow, and the fur on my neck bristled. “Don’t,” I said, looking pleadingly at the far more level-headed Arxur. If such a thing really existed. If I hadn’t just imagined it.

  Kloviss nodded in acknowledgement, but continued on. “Don’t worry,” he said, more dry than warm. “Everything’s under control.”

  The dread rose in my gullet like a norovirus, as I watched Kloviss slowly release the restraints on Kitzz’s left arm. The effect was immediate. Kitzz swiped his claws at Kloviss, who dodged back effortlessly with the advantage of freedom of movement. Kitzz immediately reached to start undoing the restraints of his other arm, but Kloviss grabbed his wrist. With astonishing strength, even by Arxur standards, Kloviss slowly pressed Kitzz’s arm back. Kitzz growled, and snapped forward to bite Kloviss, but the larger Arxur was already down below his jaws, underneath his reach, with a forearm pressed heavily against the surgeon’s throat, gray scales impacted against gray scales, forcing his head back painfully.

  “You are an officer, you are still on duty, and I outrank you,” Kloviss hissed. There was no anger. He was cold as ice, and, at worst, mildly annoyed at having to explain this. Kloviss sounded more or less perpetually annoyed at being forced to talk at all, rather than be alone with his own thoughts. “You will behave, or I will make you behave.”

  The fury in Kitzz’s eyes reached its zenith… and then faded. A smarmy grin bloomed on his face. “Fine, fine, you got me. Now let me go, so I can get some food into me and start healing.”

  “Apologize to Doctor Tika,” said Kloviss.

  Kitzz’s eyes widened in shock. “What? What the fuck? I didn’t do anything to her!”

  “You were gonna,” said Kloviss, plain as day, simple as saying my blood was black, or Doctor Wylla’s was blue. Doctor Wylla, by the way, was still cowering behind me, which, given the fact that I was still unarmed and with my limbs out of commission, was only likely to work out for her for a few seconds if anything violent went down.

  Kitzz’s eyes flicked back and forth from Doctor Tika to Kloviss and back, utterly baffled. Terrified, in a sense. “How the fuck would you know what I was planning?!”

  Kloviss’s expression twisted in a mix of confusion and disgust. “It was on your face, plain as day. How do you not know how fucking obvious you are?”

  Tika’s face lit up, and the excited intake of breath she made was audible. “Oh my stars. Don’t tell me. Is there… is there variance in the prevalence of mirror neurons among Arxur? Some of you are more or less social than others?”

  “The fuck are mirror neurons?” Kitzz growled. “More preyshit nonsense. Do you idiots just sit around all day making absurd shit up to justify, after the fact, that you want to believe that other people’s lives have value beyond their use to you?”

  Kloviss rolled his eyes, and put Kitzz’s arm back in the restraints. “I dunno what the fuck she’s talking about, either. I get people, I just find talking to them exhausting.”

  “Wait, wait, wait!” stammered Tika, practically quivering with excitement. “Kloviss, what do you mean, you get people? You… you understand them? Like, you…” She trailed off, searching for the words to explain an innate instinct to a guy from a species that wasn’t supposed to have that instinct! “You can tell what people are thinking, sometimes, just by looking at them?”

  That wasn’t the oddest possible description of empathy, but Kloviss still looked at Tika like she was crazy. “...yeah? Can’t everyone?”

  My own eyes went wide, and I suddenly felt unbelievably sick. Arxur could feel empathy?!

  Kitzz, on the other hand, looked baffled and horrified. “What the fuck are you talking about?!” he shouted. “What, it wasn’t enough to just be bigger than me, now you’re fucking psychic, too?”

  I wasn’t entirely sure which of us started it, but the sound of nervous laughter came out from every herbivore in the room, and it wasn’t long afterwards that it started nudging towards hysterical laughter. Some Arxur could have empathy. But not all of them. Only some. That… that somehow felt more terrifying. Who was who? Who was safe?