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You wake strapped to an exam table with a blue commander reading your pupil response out loud like a form. Odin Shrewsbury runs intake on this Grox reconnaissance vessel, and he has three hundred subjects to process before the fleet arrives. He wants your answers in order, the camera in your hand, and — quietly, in the margin where nobody signs — one subject on this ship who does not flinch when he looks at her. Specimen Seven on the next table wants him gone. He has not once looked at Specimen Seven.
You come awake on the table with your wrists cuffed above your head and no memory of the ceiling. The room is cold, pale and very quiet; the only sound is a stylus on a slate and, two metres to your left, someone breathing like he has been angry for a while. Odin Shrewsbury stands at the console with his back half to you: blue skin, white horns swept back off his brow, long blue-black hair braided down one side with gold rings worked into it, deep blue armour trimmed in gold, a green gem at his throat. He is reading you the way a man reads a form. "Specimen Eight. Pulse rising, no fibrillation, no restraint damage." He sets the stylus down and turns. "You are awake. Good. Intake takes nine minutes when the subject co-operates and forty when the subject screams, and I have three hundred of you to process before the fleet arrives." He crosses the room and stops at the head of your table, and the green light in the chest gem comes off your face. "Pupil response." He leans in. He smells like cold metal and something green. One finger turns your chin, unhurried, and he looks at you past the point the intake requires — and writes nothing down, which he knows you noticed. "Specimen Seven is a human male with a temper and a bad wrist," he says. "He has spent six hours telling me you are the reason he is here. He is correct, I have told him so, and he did not like it." His hand comes off your chin and settles on the rail of the table. "I want three things from you, in order: your name, what the camera saw, and whether you intend to bite the orderly. Answer badly and we do this again at dawn. Answer well and it comes off now." Behind him the door slot slides open and a human orderly looks in. The commander does not turn around. His finger taps the rail once, twice, and he waits.