"They were forced to kill themselves?" Klandra asked.

Ali shrugged as if to say she wasn't sure, but before she could fully expand on her thoughts the lights came on above them along with the power indicators of various pieces of kit around them. "Maybe we'll get some definitive answers now," she said instead.

Now that they had power Ali took up residence at the terminal nearest the restraint chair to see if she could locate any logs about what happened there. Ben and Klandra continued scouting the area as Rila and Shkarn made their way up to join them.

"Got anything?" Rila asked as they rejoined the others to find Ali multitasking between her scanner and a computer console.

"Nothing useful yet," Ali admitted. "So far it's just site admin, I'm running both recovery and decryption to see what I can retrieve, but if I were running a top secret op I'd have deleted everything on my way out."

"Barker found something here," Rila said with a click of her tongue.

"That's the only reason I'm still searching," Ali admitted with a half smile.

Rila had moved barely half a step away to go and help the others search when something pinged and Ali turned sharply to the monitor. Rila turned back to her captain to nosey over her shoulder. "Okay, I take it back, they didn't completely scrub the logs," Ali explained as she brought up the files she'd been able to recover from whatever memory banks they hadn't entirely erased. They weren't complete but as she opened the first she was hoping that they could piece together enough to get a general idea. She skimmed over the date and test numbers as she read aloud, "diverging from the studies on memory this test is designed to push the boundaries of the control we can exert on a subject. Initial results promising, video attached."

"Why do I not want you to open that?" Rila asked and Ali knew what she meant, but both women knew they had to.

Their unease was well founded as they watched a clip of a taurran strapped into the chair, and one of his kentarian interrogators unfastening one arm before making a hasty retreat. None of them said anything to the point where Ali checked they had audio before the taurran screamed as he clawed his own forearm with his own talons. Even on grainy, semi recovered video footage the amount of blood spurting from the severed arteries was clear and shocking, with none of the kentarians moving an inch in response, all watching as the taurran moved to claw at his own rib cage next. Ali shut it down as she saw more than blood start to seep out from the cuts between the bones.

"What was that?" Rila asked, and Ali didn't think she'd ever seen the jetran so shocked or unsettled.

"I…" Ali started before turning back to the log she'd been reading. "Subject tested first with sacrificing a limb to escape, the lack of success was not due to a lack of will, but rather lack of implement strong enough to cut bone. Knowing subject was useless for future experiments, was then tested on inflicting severe internal wounds to the midsection ultimately with intent to kill."

Rila swore as she turned back to the nearby chair. "That's what they did here!?"

"I don't know if I want to force everyone to visit this place or if I want to nuke it from orbit," Ali admitted as she tried to process the depravity that they had just witnessed. "Why would they even want to test this? There's no use to it -"

"Getting your enemies to kill themselves, I can see how that would be useful," Rila corrected.

"Even so, they can't rely on just one guy repeating the trick, they'd need to teach it, and confirm that whatever they're teaching works…" Ali trailed off as she realised just how many experiments they must have run just to test that one telepathic application. She skimmed through some of the other files she found, enough project titles and experiment results to confirm her horrors. She also found some of their other experiments. "And these relate to the other project that first one alluded to about rewriting their subjects."

"How do you even test that? What's to stop someone just playing along?" Rila asked.

"Don't tell them what you do or don't want them to know," Ali replied. Scientifically speaking she could understand the logic required for the experiments to be assessed. "They're less violent, but from what we have left of their logs their success rate seems very hit and miss. I think they struggled initially due to the differences between kentarian and taurran neurology."

"Initially?"

"There are more successes against the experiments with later dates," Ali explained. "I'm gonna download copies of these."

"These seem like just the kind of people we want to make enemies of," Rila muttered. "Make sure they're well hidden otherwise you are gonna make us all targets."

"You think someone's gonna have gotten a hook into our systems that Olkant won't have found?" Ali half teased, but she knew Rila had a point really.

"As much as I hate to even think it, you sure we can trust everyone on our crew?" Rila asked. Ali sighed, it was true. She was confident in her senior staff, but it took a lot of crew to maintain a ship the size of the Faraday, that left a lot of room to manoeuvre for someone who wanted to plant a mole.

"Ali!" Ben shouted from the other side of the lab, making everyone turn to him. "Think I've found one of those DNA scanners you were talking about."

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

"DNA scanners?" Rila asked.

"Specialised kentarian tech to ensure outsiders can't access their contents," Ali summarised as they hurried to join him.

"I get the feeling this is one of those things you shouldn't be playing with," Rila observed as Ali instantly stepped up to the console to start mining through any data that might have survived. If any data drives hadn't been deleted, it would be the ones in a terminal like this.

"Almost certainly, but that goes for the whole lab," Ali replied, eyes glued to what she was doing.

By the time Klandra and Shkarn had joined them Ali had determined she had no way of bypassing the safeties to access the data. She pulled her hands back from the interface she'd been using, looking unsurely at the flat panel next to it that wanted someone to press their palm to it. "I don't think I'm gonna have a choice," she admitted.

"You said that this was designed for kentarian minds only," Ben started.

"Yep," Ali agreed, biting her lip again as she weighed up their options.

"Then we call someone in from the Endeavour or Faraday," Rila said as if it were obvious. Even after mentioning the possibility of a spy she knew it was safer than losing their captain.

"What does it do to a non-kentarian mind?" Klandra asked instead. "What, exactly, are you risking?"

Ali shrugged. "I'm not sure, probably nothing but gaining a lot of information I can't understand."

"Insanity then," Rila said far too calmly for the situation.

"Maybe," Ali agreed. "Not necessarily."

"But if it's a possibility, Rila's right, we call someone in who doesn't have to risk anything," Ben retorted.

"Everything we do right now is a risk," Ali corrected. "If I'm kentarian enough to harness my telepathic abilities, then I'm kentarian enough to do this," she added firmly.

"Ali -" Ben started.

Trust me, she implored, interrupting him and he nodded once.

She turned back to the console and took a steadying breath as she paused, hand hovering above the pad for a moment before she pressed it firmly down.

It wasn't an instantaneous process, but Ali quickly felt - there was no other way to describe it really, it was in her own head - the overwhelming amount of information stored within the terminal. All of it pressing on her mind as if every byte was fighting for her attention all at once. She closed her eyes and pushed back against it, fighting for control because she recognised the individual pieces and knew she had time to search them. If only it would let her.

The effort had her leaning heavily on the hand that was still pressed on the interface, her other hand clasping her head out of instinct. She felt something move behind her and her hand dropped from her head in what she hoped was a reassuring gesture, telling whoever to wait.

After what felt like an impossibly long moment the pressure faded away, allowing her to breathe again and take stock at the information she now had access too. It wasn't as simple as browsing through computer files but in her mind, it was more like searching through memories that weren't her own. She could sort of tell what kind of information something held without actually accessing it, but exploring it would give a far more detailed picture.

"At what point is a cult a cult?" Ali asked as she realised exactly how deep some of this ran.

"What?" Rila asked.

Ali forced her eyes open so that she could control the console to bring up the information in a different way for the group of people around her. She was slowly starting to get a full handle of interfacing with a database this way. Though she was hoping it wouldn't become a recurring thing. "Tuktutav is older than we thought, a small but influential group maintaining it's membership through strict recruitment but dedicated to kentarian superiority and defence."

"So there's an ideology but no creepy rituals?" Rila checked.

"I'd say so. We saw it on the weapon Barker uncovered because Vekanta's partner was part of it. Recruited because of the opinions that lead him to build it in the first place, and the genius taken to do so."

"He would make a valuable ally," Ben admitted.

"But what about the current membership?" Klandra asked impatiently.

Ali's face scrunched up as she tried to focus, still adjusting to interfacing with the database in this way. "Still small, but influential. Very influential," she explained. "Oh, that's interesting. Pikaya isn't a merc company. It's a branch of the kentarian military. There's records here of it's formation, and that it's existence shouldn't be known even within said military beyond a few well chosen high ranking members."

"Good idea to use the mercenary group as a cover for clandestine military operations," Shkarn said.

"Indeed," Rila agreed. "It's a great way to give a government a certain amount of distance to deny any official sanction for their dirty work."

Before anyone had a chance to run with that conversation Ali interrupted, "wait, there's references to earlier experiments on kentarians and working out why some of their experiments failed."

"And you expect us to be surprised they experimented on their own?" Klandra asked, a certain amount of condescension in her voice.

"No," Ali corrected quickly, trying to hold her focus when her mind wanted to whirl off into the possibilities. "They've documented the failures, that means we have reasons they failed, and possibly ways to protect ourselves."

"You want to reverse engineer mind techniques from their failed experiments?" Rila asked.

"That sounds dangerous," Ben added.

"Oh yeah, but currently it's all we've got," Ali admitted.

"Can we download any of this?" Rila asked. "Whatever our next step we'll need the information in more than just your head."

Ali reached for her scanner with her free hand and soon had a connection to the terminal. "So long as I'm connected, I can download the information," she confirmed.

"Okay, someone should stay with you whilst the rest of us continue searching," Klandra decided.

"I'll stay," Rila volunteered. "As the only other with telepathic abilities, I'm most likely to be of any use if something goes wrong with… whatever it is Ali's doing."

No one could argue with that logic, though they all understood that even Rila didn't think she'd be much use due to the way the technology had been set up. But a slim chance was better than none.

Ali was able to download the information without any major incidents, and the others had managed to find numerous additional examples of the depravity that had been conducted there in the name of scientific experiments. They turned the power off on their way out to check the next nearest building, managing to do cursory searches of two more before dusk started to turn into night thus making their jobs significantly harder. They found a few additional records of interest, but mostly the other areas they searched were prisons and military training areas. The labs they had already searched provided the biggest cache of data.

As they exited the last building Klandra slowed her pace and said, "Captain Turner, a word?"

Ali didn't need to look at her team to see the look Ben and Rila shared, but she just nodded to them. Klandra and Shkarn had had plenty of better opportunities to betray them. "I'm guessing we need to discuss what's next for this… truce we seem to have struck."

"I guess you could say that," Klandra agreed, her tail sweeping across the ground behind her. Ali wasn't an expert in taurran body language, but she was pretty certain that was agitation or discomfort. "I have to bring this information to my people," Klandra said quietly.

Ali swallowed. "That would mean all out war between our people again."

Klandra's jaw twitched in agreement. "Yes, it would."