Dr Joan Blackwater, Medic with the US Military

"Captain Darling, I have had two hours of sleep since we got on this ship, and not even in a single session. How many have you had? Eight?"

"Er... Yes?"

"Good for you. So if you would just accept that humans aren't nearly as immune to HST as we assumed, which is were all the data is pointing, I might be able to finish my workload for today and go to bed. I have to work with Thinker Chx tomorrow, and I doubt he would approve if I came there with about the same livelihood as a zombie in the desert."

"But all the people who have been sent up so far were-"

"Less than two hundred people have been in hyperspace before us, Sir. The ones that might have experienced it probably didn't report it because no one else showed any symptoms or at least didn't talk about them. It is my opinion as a professional that this order is important for the safety of the crew, and I urge you to make it official."

Darling sighed. "Fine. Whatever you say, Doctor. I'll give the order." He stood up. "Have a good night, Joan."

"You too, Matthew.", she responded as he left. Once he had closed the curtain behind him (the Item'qar seemed to have a rather loose understanding of privacy. There had been no doors of any kind, but the humans improvised to impair visibility), it was her turn to sigh. The captain was a good man, but he had been raised extremely religiously. His parents and priests had taught him that all governments had been given the right to rule their citizens by God Himself, and even though he had embraced all the changes the world outside his village had had to offer, he still believed in authority so much that everything the government published was like gospel to him.

"Why was the zombie in the desert?"

Joan looked at the entrance as Daniel entered. "Hey", she said. "Are you already done for the day?"

"Not quite, I'm afraid. I need something for my skin." He showed her his left arm. Some kind of a rash had spread over the inside of his elbow. In the very centre, she saw some dried blood. It looked painful.

"I don't have anything for that right now. Soak some cloth in black tea and put it on there. If that doesn't help, I'll try some chemical stuff."

"Don't you dare get too specific", he laughed. She joined in, though her laughter was a bit tired.

"Careful, Daniel, or the others are gonna find out that I'm not actually a doctor.", she joked. "So what did your schedule include?"

"Nothing specific right now. There's no communication in Hyperspace, so I'm not of much use right now. I can't learn Sherim or Tarif until we actually talk to some of them. As long as we're in the void, I just help out here and there. How about you?"

"I'm supposed to meet with a Thinker by the name of Chx tomorrow. He's a xenobiologist and medic."

"Our kind of xenobiologist?", the German asked while tilting his head slightly to the right. "Or their kind of xenobiologist?"

"Theirs. I think we're supposed to help each other learn about the other's species' biology so we can learn to cure them in emergencies. But I got a message from the schedule administration a few minutes ago. Apparently, he asked if there was a mistake because 'surely he wouldn't be paired with a mammal'." She said the last part with as much arrogance as she could, and in a terrible British accent.

"So we have a racist? In space. A space racist."

"Oh god please don't"

"A spacist, if you will"

"Why are we friends?"

"Because I am a charming young man who reminds you of everything you ever wished your father to be?" he laughed.

She liked his laughter. And his smile. Not because they were pretty, he looked like an idiot when he grinned, and his laughter tended to be too high pitched. No, it was because they were honest. Her mother had once told her that the only smile you could really trust was that of an ugly man who knew he was ugly. Daniel wasn't ugly, but he certainly wasn't attractive. Due to a birth defect, he always looked disgruntled when he wasn't smiling, and when he was, it mostly showed around his eyes, while his mouth mostly got broader. And he never had had any delusions about his looks.

She liked him for many reasons. He had never tried anything, had never disrespected her in anything but the mocking way he treated almost everyone. And he was reliable. It didn't hurt that he had carried her out of a collapsing building when she had been working in Cardiff during the Welsh Revolution, the cause of the British War. But as he had once put it: "If the only reason you are friends with me is that I saved your ass once, we're not really friends."

"I think it's because you need someone to listen to your awful jokes.", she said.

"What are you gonna do about the Thinker?", he asked, getting back to the topic at hand while also dodging her jab at his love for puns. "By the way, a German accent would have been more appropriate. My ancestors were way more racist than the British."

"I'm not sure yet." Joan sighed heavily. "It took us centuries to finally get rid of that annoying habit of judging other people's qualities based on their looks, place of birth, that kind of stuff. I did not expect that the first species we meet in space would cling to such practices."

"Well, they do have a genetic caste system, so I suppose judging others based on the colour of their skin – or rather of their chitin – does make sense for them."

"I mean, yes, but after all-"

"And it's not like his arrogance is entirely unfounded, of course.", Daniel said.

"Excuse me?"

"Oh come on, don't be offended." He said as he tilted his head to the right. "The average Item'qar is vastly more intelligent than the average human. You are the most intelligent person I have met in my life, and maybe you are even smarter than most of the bugs, but from his perspective you're an amateur."

"We're not supposed to call them bugs", she said, now a little uncomfortable. "Ironic as it may be, Command says it's becoming sort of a slur, and they don't want the co-operation to suffer from some kind of interspecies racism."

"Spacism."

"Don't make up words"

"That is how language works, Joan. People make up words, and they become so common that everyone uses them. I am trying to help the English language evolve." He patted her on the shoulder encouragingly. "You are an established scientist respected throughout the global community. I'm sure the Thinker will be just as impressed as the rest of us." Then he chuckled. "Talking about impressions...", he said in a tone she knew all too well.

"Stop it."

"Did you notice..."

"Daniel, please."

"That Lieutenant Birch was exactly your type?"

"Stop trying to hook me up with random people" she groaned in mock-despair.

"You haven't been in a relationship in four years.", he said with a laugh, signalling her that he wasn't entirely serious.

"You haven't been in a relationship since I met you" she shot back.

"You two would be so cute together."

"She's what, twenty?"

"Twenty-four. I read her file"

"You stole a file so you could make fun of me?"

"No. I accidentally spent three minutes looking for the wrong file", he said with obvious intonation.

"Pretty sure that's an invasion of privacy. And probably an act of international espionage, considering you are soldiers in the armies of two different countries."

"Two allied countries, Joan. Besides, I only looked up her age, and not even because I was interested in her myself. I'm eighty percent sure that doesn't count." He raised an eyebrow. "So?"

"I'm seven years older than her. She is way too young for me .

"I am only twenty-five."

"You are also way too young for me."

He took a sharp breath and clasped his hands over his heart in an overly emotional manner as he did his best to look offended behind his grin. "That cut deep, Joan. Waayyy too deep. Also, my parents had an age gap of nine years."

"Stop trying to hook me up with people. It never worked before. It won't work now."

"No promises", he said with a chuckle.

Suddenly, she had an idea. "Wait a minute. Do you think if I could translate some of my work into Qar, I could show Chx what I can do?"

He thought about it for a minute. "It might work", he said. "There's the question of how much he can actually get out of it though. We don't know much about their biology, so why would they know any more about ours? The effort and method should be noticed though. Either way, it's the only idea you've got, isn't it?"

She nodded, already searching for a copy of her latest paper on her computer. She transferred it to a translation program. An error message appeared on the screen. She muttered a curse under her breath. "The translator program has limited capability and is only accessible by people ranked captain or above for important reasons, apparently." She looked back at Daniel.

"Forget it. If I use my well deserved rank to do people favours, I won't keep it for long."

"Oh come on. You turned down two promotions already. Your superiors love you."

"They tolerate me. They're jealous because I look so much better than they do." He ran his fingers through his hair to emphasize his supposed dashing beauty. It would probably have looked a lot better if he didn't have a military issued haircut.

"So you're actually not gonna help me? Seriously?"

"I never said that"

"What?"

"Come on. I know you're tired, but you can figure it out.", he grinned. He crouched down, apparently bored of simply standing. "Think really hard about what could help you right now. Or who."

The realization came much slower than she liked to admit to herself. "Can you write Qar?", she asked.

He jerked back up, spreading his arms as far as he could, then clapping loudly. The sound hurt her ears and stung into her tired mind like a knife. "Bingo! I am so proud of you. Of course I can write Qar. It's, like, the easiest written language ever. They only have eighteen symbols that each stand for various sounds. Occasionally, you have to guess the context. So it's not always easy to read, but the writing part is super simple. I'll have to use a translator for some of the more specific words, but I don't need to use the one with limited access." He pointed at his portable translator. They all carried one, so they would be able to talk to the Item'qar on the ship. "I can just speak them in there, and then write it down." He frowned, suddenly concerned. "It's going to take a few days, though. Even with this little to do, I can't just concentrate on this and nothing else. How long is your paper?"

"Two hundred and thirty pages, give or take"

"Give me a week. I'm a fast reader, I can do this."

"Thank you. Thank you, Daniel."

"You know, there is something you could do for me in return."

"Sure. Everything."

"Have dinner with Elizabeth Birch"

She threw a pen at him, but he had already jumped through the curtain and left, laughing.

From the Interrogation of Thinker Chx, Xenobiologist and Medic on board the Xlnfrag

The human female arrived on time. She had a translator with her, and thankfully it functioned flawlessly. I couldn't have put up with a primate speaking their gibberish. Her appearance was a bit unsettling. Her flesh was very, very pale, like the fur of the P'zim. It was as if the universe screamed her inferiority at me. At the same time, however, her... fur? Hair. Her hair was red, like the chitin of the Inquisitors. You know we are strongly colour-oriented. Thus, I had the natural instinct to both obey her and command her. I suppressed that instinct, though, and reminded myself that the humans were not from our world and thus, obviously, didn't fall into our categories.

I greeted her formally, and she introduced herself. As I had thought, she was rather sure of herself. I took no offence to that. A bit later, I introduced her to the problem of the Gul'qna virus. She said that there was something similar on her world, called "flooh". I told her to run some tests for an anti-virus on the simulator. Which, by the way, I had to explain to her. Can you believe that? They don't have simulators like that on Terra. Yet, they very much do study viruses and bacteria – the real thing! They put these biological weapons-in-waiting in a lab and just run experiments. The danger must be immense. The slightest security breach and they are all dead! Primates.

Anyway, once I had taught her how to use the simulator, which she picked up relatively fast, she started running her tests. About eighty of them. At once. I have to say, I was honestly impressed with how many different approaches she had come with in just a few minutes. The entire time she talked, she- oh, you need to understand that the simulator had been upgraded the night before by a technician so that humans could even use it. They don't know how to write in Qar, so a sound-based interface was included. The human talked into her translator, and what came out was fed to the machine. Where was I? Ah, yes. She barely stopped to think between the different approaches to finding a cure for the Gul'qna. It was as if she was thinking about several things at the same time. The simulator was overloaded, since I had been running simulations on another project as well, so it would take some time for the tests to finish. She asked me if there was anything else she could help me with, but I had nothing. I didn't expect her to come up with an idea that fast. So instead she started asking me about Item'qar biology. Which was awkward. I am a xenobiologist. Granted, I am also a medic, but that's more for emergency situations. I can patch an Item'qar up, and I know how to stop us from crying out in pain. I know some things about us, of course. And as far as I could, I answered her questions.

But at the end of the day, I study plants and animals from other planets. That is my primary profession. My "honest scream", the humans call it. Or something along those lines, at least. They have a very colourful language. So I couldn't go into detail on any of the more complex aspects of our physiology.

And then the results came in.

It was amazing. Sure, she had not found an anti-virus. But neither had I when I ran the simulations a few days earlier. There simply was none for that strain. But she had found six ways of weakening it enough for an individual with a strong immune system to beat it on their own. I myself found nine, by the way. I only do this research because I am technically the medic aboard the Xlnfrag, an actual healer would probably have found more ways than I did. But nonetheless, an impressive result, especially for a primate.

I had no doubt that this was a coincidence, by the way. The entirety of human progress seems to be based on a willingness to fail most of the time, rather than crafting a mental image of the perfect way to build a machine, master flight, go to space. Picture a hundred humans on a plateau. All have machines supposed to help them fly that have never been tested before. Each machine is unique. The humans jump, ninety-nine crash and die. But the one hundredth human soars through the air, and soon after, the human race proudly proclaims that it has conquered the skies. This is not, by the way, how they actually learned to fly. This was merely a metaphor.

Anyway, shortly after her interface gave a signal that someone needed medical assistance. She left after apologising. Which was the weirdest thing. Her services were required. The exact case for which she was aboard the ship had become reality. Yet she felt the need to apologise to me for leaving. This inefficient practice has, unfortunately, become more common even with the Item'qar of the crew over the course of this joint mission.

So I was alone in my laboratory. I took the time to copy a few works on Item'qar anatomy for me to read, to refresh my memory of the things I learned so long ago but had forgotten due to my becoming a xenobiologist. For a brief moment, I thought about giving those books to Joan Blackwater, but of course there was no way she could have read them. The translators we all carried were only for audio, and the transcribing ones that were integrated in the ship's computer could only be accessed by a warrior of the fifth rank or higher. The humans only allowed nine people access to it: The commanding officers of each nationality, as well as another three Americans, two French and one German warriors who held the same rank but were subordinate for the duration of the mission. So I decided to file a request to Command asking for permission to translate some of those works so the human could learn from them. Patching people up and curing them of diseases was her primary profession, thus it was of the utmost urgency that she knew how to treat every member of the crew. I knew, of course, that it would take some time until my request would be processed, but I wasn't in a hurry: I didn't exactly expect us to go to war any time soon.

When Joan Blackwater returned, I had made some progress with my reading, and I offered to teach her about our most common diseases. That was pretty much how we spent our first day working together. She was an eager student, I have to say. Rather talented, too, though not exceptional when compared to the average Thinker.

Over the course of the next few days, we frequently switched between our roles as teacher, student, medic and scientist: We taught the other as much as we could in the short periods of time between her calls to duty and my more critical experiments. I learned many things about the human race in that time. The human female seems to go through a cycle of twenty five to thirty Terran days during which the basic hormone levels change drastically. At the end of that cycle, an egg, that is taken from a stock of eggs each cycle and ready to be fertilized, gets discarded as it is no longer strong enough. That, apparently, can be rather painful in the more extreme situations. The males also go through a similar cycle, though it is a few days longer and does not include any eggs being discarded. These cycles appear to be responsible for some of the mood swings both males and females go through. Also, the humans do have strong genetic differences, contrary to popular belief, that make some of them more suitable to be Thinkers, Warriors, Leaders or Workers. They use different terms for that, though, and apparently refuse to acknowledge this reality: Rather than making people do what they are best at for the good of society, they mostly let them do what they are passionate about and just hope for the best. Joan Blackwater did not say it this way, of course, but it was fairly obvious.

As is to be expected from such a young species, the human physiology has not yet reached its perfect state. There are several parts of their body that don't seem to fulfil any specific purpose, but if they get injured or taken out, the human in question is in great danger. Their jaws are often too small to contain all of their teeth, leading to some quite brutal methods of making sure that all the teeth are where they belong. If that is not possible, they rip the superfluous teeth out of their jaws. Usually with medication against the pain, but Joan Blackwater told me that it was customary to do it without any such precautions for several centuries. Also, the human medics have not yet found a