Memory Transcription Subject: Chief Executive Officer Sifal, Seaglass Mineral Concern

  Date [standardized human time]: January 25, 2137

  I’d never actually been in a mine before, but it looked how it had been described to me in school. A hole had been bored into the side of a mountain. The hole became a tunnel, and then the tunnel slowly sloped underground towards where the valuable ores were. The tunnel was larger than I’d expected, but I supposed that it had to be. The little pedestrian walkway we took towards the main mining office inside was dwarfed by the underground road adjacent to it. My head turned to watch an enormous dump truck drive past us, its freight bed full of minerals being carted out from the depths. The driver’s head turned towards us as well, and, with an expression of sheer terror, the little Nevok tried to floor it, but the truck couldn’t really go much faster when hauling that kind of tonnage. It was interesting to see a Nevok scared, at least. Debbin was still cool as the stones around us, and even his Chief of Security--another, slightly rougher-looking Nevok whose name I hadn’t caught yet--was mostly keeping his head in the game for the sake of professionality and public safety. A coward would never have earned the top security job over his Yulpa deputy.

  It was cool underground, and I detected a slight breeze. The mines were properly ventilated, then. That was good. I was still idly wracking my brain for all my old lessons on industrial mining, most of which I hadn’t so much as thought about since my academy days, when we arrived at the office. A pudgy and inexplicably damp Takkan shuffled out wearing a set of blue worker’s overalls full of endless pockets and tool holsters, topped with a tool belt to carry even more. I hoped it was an affectation. Surely even the Federation wasn’t foolish enough to operate their mines with hand tools.

  “Ah, thank goodness you Grays are here,” said the Takkan, ambitiously gunning for the top spot on the official ‘phrases I was least expecting to hear’ rankings. Also, hang on, Grays? Takkans had gray skin, too! “It’s all a bunch of lazy, unmotivated louts from here on in. A little fear of fangs’ll get them working double-time.” The Takkan held… his? hand out. Two fat fingers and a big thumb made it look like he was wearing a weird pair of gray leather mittens. “Foreman Farrin, at your service, sir.”

  “It’s ma’am,” I corrected, shaking Farrin’s hand. “And yourself?”

  “The diggers call me ma’am as well, but you don’t have to, ma’am,” said Farrin, dabbing at her face with a cloth. “Don’t worry, I’ve already taken the liberty of threatening to feed the laziest layabouts to your lot. Productivity’s already up!”

  My eyes widened. Prey were not supposed to be this predisposed towards cruelty. It was beginning to legitimately concern me how everyone on this planet seemed to be out of their fucking minds. “Gods of old, woman, we’ve only been in charge of the planet for like three hours!”

  Farrin nodded sagely. “And that’s no call for dilly-dallying. Doesn’t matter who’s sat at the desk topside. We got digging to do all the same.” She didn’t smile--it’d probably be a few more days before she picked up that mannerism--but Farrin seemed to preen, proudly, at how helpful and productive she was being. She put her hand on my arm like we were old friends, and I had to try not to recoil. “Come now, ma’am, let’s look over our operation together. I’m certain you’ll be right proud of the work we’ve been up to.” Even her accent sounded bizarre and wrong.

  As for the mine itself… it was a mine. For all Farrin’s prattling on about diggers, most of the work was done by heavy machinery, which also seemed to be the main extraction bottleneck. The survey team had already identified a dozen other mineral deposits worth digging for--it was a whole mineral-rich planet, and thus far largely untouched--but they just didn’t have enough drills, and the drills they were using kept needing time to cool down, which struck me as a design flaw.

  “So, what’s your predatory assessment?” asked Debbin, grinning with pride at his investment.

  “You could get more aggressive,” I said, admittedly playing right into the stereotype. “For starters, you’re underground, running on electric lights. There’s no good reason for two shifts, morning and evening, and then closing up shop overnight. You can keep three shifts in rotation and have the mine open continuously.”

  Debbin looked introspective, but Farrin was already clucking her tongue in a patronizingly motherly way. “Now, now, ma’am, that’s not how we do things. Can’t have the workers out and about at nighttime. That’s when they’re at the greatest risk of being attacked by predators.”

  I stared at her like she was daft. “This planet is barren outside of its oceans,” I said incredulously. “The only predators on this planet that can breathe air are currently touring the facilities.”

  “It’s still a cultural thing,” said Farrin, shaking her head. “We can’t be sure, and so we can’t, in good conscience, order the miners to commute in after dark.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Offer a small pay increase to anyone who volunteers to take the undesirable shift. You’re still net-positive just keeping the mine running.”

  Debbin nodded. “Might cost a little more than that to keep security and public transportation running after hours as well, but the math still adds up. I’m more worried about overworking the drills.”

  I made a sweeping gesture towards the currently idling drill. The prey were taking a break while the drill cooled off. Just to hammer home that I was surrounded by crazy people, the workers across the room from us cowered in terror behind the machinery at the sight of me waving a claw around as I spoke, but Debbin and Farrin, who were actually within arm’s reach, had no reaction. “Can we talk about the drills? We clearly need more of them.”

  Debbin shook his head. “Too expensive of an upfront cost.”

  “You’re literally bottlenecked by a lack of machinery, though,” I pointed out. “It’ll pay for itself.”

  Debbin’s brow furrowed. “It still feels like an unnecessary risk,” he said. “It’s a lot of money up front, and we’d be taking a huge hit if the equipment breaks before the break-even point, or if the market dips too far.” The Nevok shook his head. “The best way to make money is to not lose the money you’ve already got.”

  I shook my head. I was considered risk-averse by Arxur standards, but this seemed excessive. “This is investing in our primary revenue stream,” I said. “I’d call it an extremely necessary risk. Look, if nothing else, get some aftermarket coolant upgrades for the existing drills. Keep the current ones running longer, and if they break, you can reinstall the upgrades onto the replacements.” Were Federation mining drills unusually flimsy if he was worrying about them breaking down within the year? Did we want to explore other manufacturers? Arxur-made models weren’t available to traitors or prey, but maybe Earth made something a little less shoddy? Ah, but did they even have the manufacturing bandwidth to export industrial equipment with the war going on? The whole situation was a mess.

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  Debbin nodded along, doing the math in his head. “Coolant upgrades could help a bit, yes. Alright, we’ll start with the upgrades and the triple-shifts. See if we can squeeze more productivity out of our existing assets. We have to make sure the rest of the operation upstream can scale up to handle the increased production rate. Transportation, the on-site foundries, and so on.”

  “Get more foundries built, too,” I muttered, as we walked to the next area. “I don’t know why you’re shipping unprocessed ore at all. It’s just wasting space in the cargo holds.”

  Debbin shook his head. “Look, it’s all about slowly scaling up operations to the point of profitability.”

  “You own. A planet!” I growled, ducking slightly under a stoney passageway that hadn’t been bored out for trucks yet. “Nothing about this needs to be slow.” We entered a largeish room that inexplicably contained no drill, just three prey hard at work with pickaxes like a bunch of primitives. In fact, speaking of primitives, one of them was even a Yotul, those new uplifts in my old sector. How did one of those even get out here to Seaglass? Their species was still barely permitted anywhere near an FTL drive. “And what’s with this? Do I need to explain to you why this is completely inefficient?”

  “You heard the lady!” Farrin bellowed. I flinched back out of sheer surprise for how loud she sounded. She had the volume to rival an Arxur. “Pick up the pace. Swing those pickaxes more efficiently!” She shook her head in disgust, and gently touched my arm again with an air of unasked-for familiarity. “Honestly, they’re trying their hardest, but there’s just not much you can ask from that lot there.”

  I gestured at the three workers with the arm Farrin had been getting too friendly with, forcing her to drop it. “I meant why are they using pickaxes in the first place? It’s utterly pointless. Just put them on drill shifts like the others.”

  Debbin shook his head. “You can’t trust that lot around heavy machinery,” he said. “They’ve got Predator Disease.”

  A Zurulian let her pickaxe fall out of her forepaws and fell back down to all fours, laughing hysterically. “I was right. I was fucking right! You all see it, don’t you? Don’t you?!”

  The Nevok in their group of three, a younger man than Debbin, huddled against the wall, practically shuddering and convulsing, as the Yotul, an older woman, placed a comforting paw on his shoulder. Farrin reared up like she was about to stamp over there and give them a piece of her mind. I put my hand on her arm, returning the favor, but gripped with enough force to keep her pinned in place unless she wanted to lose the limb.

  “Ignore them,” I said to Debbin and Farrin. “Explain to me. What are these people? What is Predator Disease?” I whipped my gaze over towards Debbin, who finally recoiled a bit at my attention. He knew how strong I was, and he knew I was becoming angry. “Is this what you were worrying about on the transport? Some disease, spread by predators, that inexplicably jumped biospheres where no virus before it ever could?”

  “I don’t know!” Debbin shouted, trying not to backpedal too visibly. “Look, you realize I’ve had a lot of new things to come to terms with today, alright?”

  “I’m an expert on Predator Disease!” the Zurulian shouted desperately. “University of Colia! I’m here against my will because I thought Arxur might be people. But I was right, wasn't I? You are?!”

  My eyes widened. “Yes? We are. Of course we are. Please come closer and explain what in the world is going on.”

  The little Orso… no, that wasn’t a real species. That was a silly fantasy I kept indulging in. The Zurulian, the little bear cub looking thing, plodded up to me, and it was difficult not to feel for her. Her facial expressions were neither Arxur nor human, but they hurt to see nevertheless. This was the power and curse of Terran Empathy, as I’d learned it. I could see things in a new way now, and those inner eyes couldn’t close.

  The Zurulian looked like she wanted to cry, but she held it together for the sake of getting her point across. She was back up on two legs, her forepaws balancing partway up my leg. “The Federation aggressively treats deviations from herd-normal behavior as ‘unpreylike’, that is to say ‘predatory’,” she said. “It’s not based on anything scientific. We Zurulians have been studying pathogen infection pathways since before first contact. There isn’t one for Predator Disease, and there certainly isn’t one that explains…” The little bear-like creature took a deep breath and glared at Debbin. “Every! Single! Mental illness! Yes, I studied what Earth knew before you assholes arrested me!”

  “I had nothing to do with her arrest,” Debbin protested, fully denying exactly one accusation in a hefty list. He didn’t even contradict her professional credentials.

  I generously overlooked the Zurulian’s attempts at physical contact. She seemed to need it, and it bothered me less than when the Takkan did it. “I have access to certain Terran literature,” I said. “What would you recommend to corroborate your story?”

  “The DSM-7!” the Zurulian shouted. “It’s the human diagnostic manual for mental health. It’s absurdly more advanced than anything the Federation had access to!”

  Debbin, at this point, regained his footing. “Sifal. Come on. This isn’t productive.”

  I stared at him like he’d gone mad. “Finding the truth is always productive.”

  Debbin rolled his eyes. “Sure, but those of us in charge need to make certain accommodations with the truth.”

  I still stared at him like he’d gone mad. “No. We really don’t. Lying to others is predatory. Lying to yourself is just fucking foolishness.” I scooped up the Zurulian since she was practically trying to climb me already, and turned to the other two prisoners with the little herbivore perched on my shoulders. “And you two? What are you in for?”

  The other Nevok shook his head frantically, but seemed to convulse in a peculiarly repetitive fashion. The older Yotul next to him shook her head. “He’s just twitchy. That’s it, near as I can tell.”

  “The humans call it Tourette’s Syndrome,” said the Zurulian by my ear. “It’s harmless.”

  I nodded. I could check that later. “And you? What are you in for?” I asked the Yotul.

  The Yotul shrugged. “Rebellion.”

  “We have that in common,” I said, trying not to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. “What did you rebel about?”

  “The Federation set my pet on fire,” she replied, nonchalantly.

  I nodded. “Understandable.” I turned back towards Debbin, who’d likely be sweating right now if his species had the capability. Wait, hang on, was that why Farrin was so weirdly damp all the time? I hadn’t realized that Takkans could sweat. “So… to sum up, Debbin, you were… what, using mental patients as involuntary laborers?”

  Debbin threw his little paws up in the air in defeat. “Alright, yes. Fine. You got me. I get a pretty sizeable tax break if I’m helping to ‘rehabilitate’ Predator Disease patients into becoming helpful and productive members of society again.”

  Farrin nodded in agreement. “Work builds character.” She glared at the smaller alien perched on my shoulder. “Everyone gets curious or furious sometimes, but that’s no excuse for betraying the herd with dangerous ideas and open rebellion. They should have found a more useful outlet, like I did.” Farrin went back to obsequious beaming again like she was trying to suck up to me. “I’m sure you understand it better than all of us,” she said, putting her hand on my arm again. “It’s very admirable of you, finally turning your violent urges towards something productive and useful. Why, I still remember the first time I--”

  “Farrin, I swear to all the gods I’ve lost, if you touch me again without permission, you’re pulling back a stump,” I growled. The Takkan’s eyes went wide, and she yanked her hand back like I was made of hot metal. Satisfied, I turned back towards Debbin. “I want these three transferred to my personal custody until I can verify…” I flicked my eyes over to the Zurulian mental health expert perched on my shoulder. “Sorry, what’s your name?”

  “Tika,” she said, tearing up. “My name is Tika.”

  “Until I can verify Tika’s story,” I finished.

  “Thank you… thank you so much!” Tika said, practically rubbing up against me like a cat, which was triggering a mess of emotions in me that I’d need to unpack and examine at some point.

  “I think we’re done with the mines for now,” I said, as the Yotul lady began the process of coaxing the younger Nevok into following me out to relative freedom. “Let’s get me set up with an office. I’ve got some reading to do.”