The Genocidal Healer

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THEY had assembled in a temporarily unused compartment on the hospital’s eighty-seventh level. The room had seen service at various times as an observation ward for the birdlike Nallajims of physiological classification LSVO, as a Melfan ELNT operating theater, and, most recently, as an overflow ward for the chlorine-breathing Illensan PVSJs, whose noxious atmosphere still lingered in trace quantities. For the first and only time it was the venue of a military court and, Lioren thought hopefully, it would be used to terminate rather than extend life.

Three high-ranking Monitor Corps officers had taken their seats facing a multispecies audience that might be sympathetic, antagonistic, or simply curious. The most senior was an Earth-human DBDG, who opened the proceedings.

“I am Fleet Commander Dermod, the president of this specially convened court-martial,” it said in the direction of the recorder. Then, inclining its head to one side and then the other, it went on. “Advising me are the Earth-human Colonel Skemp-ton of this hospital, and the Nidian, Lieutenant-Colonel Dragh-Nin, of the Corps’s other-species legal department. We are here at the behest of Surgeon-Captain Lioren, a Tarlan BRLH, who is dissatisfied with the verdict of a previous Federation civil-court hearing of its case. The Surgeon-Captain is insisting on its right as a serving officer to be tried by a Monitor Corps military tribunal.

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