And to Dust We Shall Return.

calculated risk

'Don’t you people have anything better to do that stand around taking up space??' Barked Nim as she pushed her way through the throng of people lining the corridor.  Heads turned as she passed. The sound of muttering slowly dying on the lips of the spectators. An ensign, fresh faced and full of irritatingly youthful ambition, trotted over to her. 
'Oh good you're here!' They said eagerly. 'Follow me it’s this way.'

This deck contained some of the ships fancier quarters. Usually they were used for keeping palettes of the questionable substances that the chef referred to as 'quality ingredients'. But they had been recently cleared out in order to house Sjors and his crew. Nim saw that one of the doors to these apartments had been crudely roped off with holotape. The words; definitely not a crime scene And, nothing to see here, stamped repeatedly on its length in several languages. That would explain the onlookers. Nim thought grimly as she ducked underneath. Nothing attracted a crowd so quickly as a crime scene. However it was labelled.
  

Inside was not a pretty sight. Furniture lay upturned and scattered about the room. Several chairs were missing legs. And a rather expensive looking plexiglass table had been smashed in half.  In the center of this chaos, lay one of Sjors’s officers. Lifeless and still. His left hand clutching an empty bottle. To Nim’s relief, the doctor had already been called, and was bent low over the body, scanning. 

'Is he umm y'know?' Nim asked him urgently. 

'Not yet. But will be soon without treatment. Detected high concentration of thallium in his bloodstream.' He nodded toward the bottle. 'Best guess, somebody tried to poison him.' 

Nim pinched her nose and groaned. Things were complicated enough without having to add attempted murder to her list.  'Great.' She said sarcastically. 'Do you think you can save him?'

'Difficult to say.'  The doctor replied grimly. 'But will certainly try.'

Nim nodded. 'Do what you can.' She got heavily to her feet and cornered the ensign. 'You there, help the doctor get him to sick bay. Then secure the area. I don’t want anyone coming in or out without my orders.'

'Oh err...Yes sir!' they said, scrambling into action. Leaving Nim to survey the room in silence.  The only thing that wasn’t smashed or overturned was a small table, on which a single shot glass rested. Something brown and sticky still lingering in the bottom. Nim bent down and sniffed it. The scent of alcohol, sharp as turpentine, cut through her sinuses and she coughed. Strange, that there had obviously been such a struggle in the room, and yet there was no blood. And only one glass laid out to drink from.  
Nim got down on her hands and knees and peered at the carpet.  Searching for a muddy footprint or a few stray hairs. Anything that might tell her who else might have been in the room. Sure enough, ground deep into the fibers of the carpet she found a stain.

 She poked at it experimentally with the back of her penknife. It was black and slick and sticky, but sort of crumbly too. Like it was trying to be both solid and liquid at the same time. Her stomach, squirmed. Folding itself over until it had tied itself into a hard little knot of anguish. She had only seen a substance like this once before. 
And it had been squid shaped.

..
'My patience will only stretch so far captain!' Growled Sjors. His tiny eyes twinkling dangerously.   'Mathil was one of my best officers. He nearly died due to your negligence, and yet you refuse to arrest the one responsible. Pah! You are just as spineless as the rest of the union!'
The captain resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She had seen this situation coming the moment that the changeling had drifted across her view screen. And she had known that it would not be an easy one to negotiate. 

All species had been wary of the shapeshifters when they had first dropped anchor in the quadrant.  Because whatever odd arrangement of limbs and eyes and squishy bits they happened to possess, they had all been united by three things. They were each of them born, a little lump of cells, then grew into a slightly bigger lump that reached adulthood, got a job, became disillusioned by the constant grinding of societal pressures, and then died. Nobody had much control over this process. You became what your genes told you to become, and you lived as long as time allowed you to live. This was understandably, quite a traumatic process for all concerned, and so it was in bonding over this shared burden. The universal sadness of living such a fragile, temporary life, that the many life forms of the galaxy shared a strange sort of trust. 

 Changelings however, upended all of that. Nobody knew how long they could go without dying (unless given a little outside help) and they weren’t locked, as all other creatures were, into a prison of their own flesh. Instead they were made of particles. Free floating in a statically charged cloud of stuff that could bend and compile its atoms as it chose. Some people resented them, some feared them. Nobody trusted them. How could you? When they were capable of lying with their entire being?
  But, illusions and existential horror aside, they had seemed amicable enough. They weren’t interested in fighting for resources, or gaining some kind of political leverage. They only wanted, they said, to explore. Much as many species do. And it was this that had led them so far from home.  That was all fine and dandy then, People thought. And in time, minds met. Alliances were forged. There was even talk of them joining the union. But it wasn’t to last. Dissent arose between the planets of the union. Old arguments, long since buried by reason, started being dredged up again. The clichéd insults made at family dinners turned into outright rows. And those in turn, became wars.

 The changeling government refused to take sides. Merely sitting back to watch with bags of pretend popcorn as the various planets tore themselves apart. Then, someone somewhere, found that their beloved uncle wasn’t their uncle anymore.  And the news broke, All over the galaxy that people had been kidnapped and then replaced by changeling spies. The planets of the union flushed out the imposters one by one, and then turned their anger toward the shape shifters. The resulting war was long. And bitter. Because what the shapeshifters lacked in numbers they made up for in guile. But eventually they were beaten back. Fleeing to their own quadrant with their false tails between their legs. 

After the dust settled, conspiracy theories abounded. Some claimed they had polluted their own worlds and now they were looking to take over someone else’s. Some even believed they weren’t living things at all. But the souls of the damned coming to exact their revenge on the living. The captain, though, wasn’t sure. There had been plenty of talk, even in the beginning, of the risks that letting the changelings join would pose. Many had been quite vocal in voicing their discontent. She had seen the names scrawled on walls. Heard the rumors spread in dark alleyways. 
And she couldn't help but wonder if the changelings had only become their enemies, because they’d been treated so much like they already were.

'Your concern is understandable, Sjors.' She said calmly. 'Please be assured that my crew are doing everything in their power to gather the necessary evidence. But either way, I cannot convict her without a fair trial.'

Sjors stood up, and sputtered something that somehow sounded even more threatening for being unintelligible. 'What is a trial captain? But a game of competitive lying.’ His large hand reached into the corner of his jacket, and came out again clutching a grotesquely large lazer pistol. The captain wondered briefly, how he'd managed to keep it hidden in there. It could hardly be comfortable. 'A weapon on the other hand, does not discriminate.'

The captain looked down the barrel of the gun. She had seen the business end of a variety of weapons in her lifetime, and generally thought it to be quite an underwhelming experience, since it could only end one of two ways. 

'It may not discriminate Sjors.' She said coolly. ‘But it does not know mercy either.'

‘PAH!' He flipped the pistol around in his hand and tucked it back inside his jacket. His brows sunk into such a deep frown that his beady eyes were buried under it. Like tiny pebbles in a landslide. 
'If justice is not served soon, captain' he said. The rusty chainsaw blade that passed for his vocal chords crunching dangerously on the syllables. 'Neither will I.'
He hurled his great bulk around and headed for the door, in what would have been a very dramatic exit. Were it not for the fact that he was a good deal taller than the doorframe.
And he had forgotten to duck.

The captain got up, and examined the large crack that was now cleaving its way through the solid plate of exosteel.  She had every trust that Nim to solve the case. One way or the other.
But whether she could do it before Sjors drained his teaspoons worth of patience- that was another kind of risk entirely.