Memory Transcription Subject: First Officer Sifal, ARS Bleeding Heart

  Date [standardized human time]: January 25, 2137

  Our new prisoners were restrained out on the open tarmac as we--no, as I--decided what to do next with them. At least it was a nice day. Mid-morning, sun was in and out of the clouds, and it was warm but not hot. I was, as of yet, the only Arxur present who would have felt bad about letting any of our prisoners pass out from exposure, so I was glad that it was a non-issue. Quite a few passed out anyway, though, from sheer terror. Likely a few had passed out from blood loss as well, and it was worryingly difficult to tell the difference. Kitzz was in no position to hobble around and check, and the other, less-qualified, medics were causing more terror blackouts just by getting close enough to the prey to diagnose them.

  Oddly, though, there were at least two Feds present who appeared, by any reasonable metric, to be more furious than fearful. Garruga, the Yulpa, even with mangled legs and substantial blood loss, looked like she wanted to bite someone’s face off even more than we did, and Debbin, the Nevok executive officer, wore a quietly aristocratic lividity on his face that would have been terrifying if he were twice as tall and a distant cousin to the Prophet-Descendant. On a small fluffy creature like himself, though, the expression was just amusingly incongruous, like a hatchling pretending to be a Chief Hunter.

  Still, it posed a slight problem. Most of the human interrogation and compliance techniques I’d read up on, I hadn’t actually practiced yet, and most of the notes I’d prepared presumed--fairly reasonably, I would argue--that the subject was already cowed by us before we began the conversation. Every word further would focus on getting them to accept that we were… if not friendly, at least appeaseable. I didn’t have a plan prepared for someone actively hostile. I genuinely hadn’t thought that the prey had had it in them. I needed to improvise, and quickly.

  “Into the cattle ship with them, then?” asked Laza.

  “No,” I said. “We’re not taking them as cattle, so it sends the wrong message. It’s a nice day, just leave them where they are for now. I’m sure the troops won’t mind the fresh air.” I tapped my maw. So many things that needed doing, but I probably didn’t have to micromanage all the little details. Just the ones that involved deviations from standard operating practice. “We need to filter out the VIPs, and find someplace private to put them for individual interrogation.”

  Laza nodded. “We’re picking their storage units clean anyway. I’ll post some guards on any emptied cargo containers. I assume you want to talk to their leader first?”

  “No, actually. Let him stew for a bit.”

  Laza blinked. “Let him… what? I’m not familiar with that word.”

  “Hasn’t been uttered in centuries,” I muttered. My own damn language, and I’d had to learn the word for ‘stew’, noun and verb, from the fucking translator. Betterment would burn for what they did to our culture. “Leave the head Nevok locked up, alone, to contemplate his poor taste in allies. I have a new interrogation technique I’d like to employ on him. You and I will do a trial run on the Yulpa.”

  “Happily.” Laza nodded slowly. She quickly flipped through the stolen personnel records in her holopad. “She called herself Garruga… ah! Assistant Director of Security. Excellent. Someone important enough to interrogate, but not so important that we can’t afford to lose them to a misstep.”

  How fortuitous. The troops went about setting up the interrogation rooms, and I briefed Laza on my plan. “This is a two-person interrogation technique,” I explained, “so I’ll need your assistance with it.”

  Laza nodded. “Honored, ma’am. What would you have me do?”

  I broke it down as best I could. “Alright. I’m going to be diplomatic, but they’re going to refuse to negotiate because they hate us. Remember, these are the same squabbling children who spat in the humans’ faces, and the humans actually like them. So we’re going to need to tip the scales in our favor. What you’re going to do is be a constant and terrifying reminder of Option B: we scrap our sustainability plans and just go back to killing them all.” I paused for a moment to choose my words carefully. I wanted to evoke the visual that I was desperately holding my barely-controlled subordinates back, but I didn’t want to plant the idea in Laza’s head that I was actually a vulnerable or supplantable leader. “We are creating the illusion that I am a uniquely sympathetic face, and that appeasing and obeying me is the only thing preventing them from being massacred by the rest of the Arxur on this planet.”

  I could see the gears turning in Laza’s head. “Away from me, towards you. I see. It’s like the diplomatic equivalent of flushing prey out into an ambush. Interesting.” She was silent for a moment, until a thought occurred to her. “If this technique is effective, why haven’t the humans employed it?”

  I sighed. “I don’t think the humans enjoy being feared. For us, though, that ship left the hangar ages ago.” I shook my head. “Ready, Lieutenant?”

  “Always.”

  I opened the door to the shipping container. The Yulpa was laying in the corner, all four of her legs too injured to even crouch on. She looked like someone had tried to paint a huge Sulean brown and then gotten bored before they’d finished the hindlegs. Bandages and splints were stained where her black blood seeped through. It was going to be some time before that stopped smelling delicious to me, but at least I wasn’t hungry anymore. Garruga twisted her head around to fix us both in a single eye’s field of view. I presumed she had a second eye in the usual spot, but I could only see one side of her long face while she was lying down like this. Her prehensile tongue curled back the way a clawless creature might wind up for a punch. It wasn’t intimidating. I sat down on the ground in front of her. “Assistant Security Director Garruga,” I said neutrally, “I am Commander Sifal. May I offer you some water? You’ve lost a great deal of blood.”

  Garruga attempted to spit on me and failed because she genuinely needed the water. “Choke on me!”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said impassively.

  “Liar. Your kind is always hungry,” she growled. “Your instincts drive you to feed, forever.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  I snorted. “Our instincts do not compel us to fill our stomachs to literal bursting. Evolution has a habit of weeding out any instincts quite so counterproductive as that.” I held out a canteen. “We have much to discuss. Drink, before you pass out from dehydration.”

  “Nothing to discuss,” Garruga’s dry throat choked out. She was down to barking out short phrases. “Predator. Barely-sapient. Beast.”

  Laza grabbed the Yulpa’s tongue and squeezed until a yelp escaped. “If it’s just going to insult you like this, Commander, perhaps it doesn’t need its tongue. I’ve heard Yulpa tongues are a delicacy.”

  Thin slices of tongue, raw, in something like that salty-sour tuna poke sauce with the fragrant oil… I mused idly. I sighed. As much as I’d tried, the Terran cookbooks I’d been gifted were nearly useless without Terran seasonings. I hadn’t been able to replicate a single dish more complicated than chopped or seared meat. I wasn’t hungry anymore, but I missed the artistry. The pictures taunted me with treasures beyond my grasp.

  “Do Yulpas season their food, Garruga?” I asked.

  “What the fuck?” the other two women said in near-unison, though the Yulpa’s restrained tongue forced her to skip a few consonants.

  “I’m asking the questions here!” I said by reflex. That line, I’d practiced. Still, I wasn’t alone in an engineering bay anymore. I needed to stop letting my mind wander in the middle of work. Now I was stuck needing to double-down on my absurd question, just to look like I meant business. At least the question still helped establish common ground. “I understand that you eat different food than we do,” I said, in what was a strong contender for the understatement of the century. “I’m asking if your people season it. Spices, sauces, that sort of thing?”

  “I’m from a fucking jungle planet, of course we have spices,” Garruga gargled around her restrained tongue out of sheer bafflement.

  “What’s your favorite?” I asked.

  Garruga just stared, slack-jawed, unable to comprehend that this conversation was the direction in which her morning was going. I think her eye was twitching.

  Laza, for her part, tried to follow orders, but was rapidly spiraling herself. “The, uh. The Commander asked you a, ah, question?” She waved her claws at Garruga, but she was too confused to put her heart into it.

  I nodded. “It’s true. I asked what your favorite spice is. See, I visited the human homeworld not too long ago, and they love spices. Made me realize how much I was missing out on, just eating plain raw meat. I mean, could you live like that? Just eating, what, raw leaves with no seasoning, forever?” Garruga’s eye narrowed, and her jaw twitched like she was mouthing words as she thought. Maybe she was contemplating it? Audibly, though, I sighed. “Look, I wanted to try something new today. Really change things up, you know? How your people and mine interact? But if you can’t even indulge me an irrelevant little hobby like this, then there’s really no point in continuing, is there? I guess Lieutenant Laza was right. You really can’t be anything to us besides food.” I stood, doing my best to look disappointed--crushed, even--and I gave Laza a bleak smile and a clap on the back before turning to leave.

  “KOH-ihha,” Garruga called out. The translator flagged an unclear near match as I turned back to face her. I nodded to Laza, who let go of Garruga’s tongue. The Yulpa retracted it, trying to work some feeling and moisture back into the long writhing thing. “Konimma,” she repeated, as the translator helpfully chirped out a blurb about a pungently aromatic tree bark with some medicinal properties. “We have… porridges,” the Yulpa continued, the words slowly dragged from her raw throat. “Starchy fruits. Bland on their own. Sprinkle of powdered konimma makes it better.”

  There were a couple Terran recipes for meats stewed with powdered tree bark, I recalled with hopeful ambition. Still, for the moment, I resolved to make casual conversation. “Is that your peoples’ staple dish? Starchy fruit porridge?” I shrugged. “The Federation members in my sector were more fond of grains, I think.”

  Garruga shrugged. “Farmland’s… expensive. The jungle provides,” she choked out before her mouth went dry. Still, she pantomimed grabbing something high up with her tongue, then stamping it with her foreleg. She winced, immediately regretting moving her bandaged limb. Not a lot of manual dexterity on her species, I thought. Warm fruit mash makes sense. I offered her the water again, and she drank greedily, spilling damn near half of it in the process. No matter, we had more. “Can’t go against nature,” she said, coughing.

  I shrugged. “Is that an idiom, or…?”

  She snorted. “No. You. You can’t go against nature. No one can. You kill me, you eat. I kill you, the Great Spirit provides, and makes the trees bear fruit, I eat. Nature is transactional. Only life pays for life.”

  “Sounds like hunting with extra steps,” Laza grumbled.

  “Hunting us is farming with extra steps,” Garruga shot back.

  They both began to look profoundly uncomfortable as the implications of similarity settled in.

  I laughed. “Whatever. I’m an engineer. My job is to defy nature. It's just a matter of understanding the rules, and forging the right tool to exploit a loophole.”

  Garruga’s lips curled back into a sneer. “None of us are above the rules of nature.”

  I shrugged. “None of us were above the clouds until we taught ourselves how to fly.”

  Garruga glared at me, but just licked her lips in silence for a few moments. Eventually, her eye flicked towards the empty canteen on the ground. I held out my hand to Laza, who handed me her full canteen without needing to be asked. The Yulpa managed to swallow most of it this time. In the Arxur Rebellion, one learns to enjoy the subtle sighs of satiation, and Garruga drank just enough water to quietly emit one, deep in her throat. “What do you want from me? From the people of this colony?” she asked.

  I nodded diplomatically. “Well, it’s as we discussed. Thanks to the humans, we’ve found a new source of food. We don’t need to hunt you anymore. We still can--you’re not wrong that eating you is a popular idea among my subordinates. Culture doesn’t change overnight, and they’re frankly just not as innovative as I am--but eating you is no longer a necessity.” I grinned with the mixture of cordiality and menace that came, part and parcel, with my sheer volume of teeth. “Your new job is to help me convince them,” I nodded toward Laza, “there’s something else you can do for us than just ‘be food’. Something that keeps you alive and well and maybe even happy, rather than just, you know, the old tired tactic of keeping you split open in a freezer somewhere. Because you’re not terribly off the mark about nature being transactional, but with all this ‘life for life’ silliness, I think you might be misinformed about the exchange rate. The market just crashed. Your life is no longer valuable to me.” I smiled. “What else ya got?”

  Garruga’s eye went wide. I tapped her gently on the nose with the flat of a claw, as my tail eagerly swished behind me in anticipation. I couldn’t wait to hear what kinds of ideas the Yulpa had to make me happy.