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offered her a thin smile.
‘I'm afraid you no longer have the authority to order me off duty
for medical reasons.’
    Miranda looked at him darkly.
‘So much the worse for you, Lucas. Because if I had, I would be
delaying that little mission of yours until you were properly
rested, maybe even until you got a life outside of work for a
change.’
    ‘ Thank you, Miranda, but I do
have a life. I would have thought as a physician, you would have
picked that up already.’
    ‘ Oh I don't mean that kind of
life, Lucas, I mean the kind of life with meaning, with happiness.
You know, the kind of life everybody else has? With recreation,
with holidays, with something other than endless work.’
    ‘ I don't need one of those,’
Lucas replied with another thin smile. ‘But I really do need you to
tell me that the woman over there, Jane, is okay.’ Lucas could tell
that his expression had changed in that moment, that whereas before
he’d been sarcastic, now he was genuinely concerned. He honestly
couldn't help it; he really was concerned. That woman had just been
attacked by one of the most vicious and capable robots in the
galaxy.
    Miranda crossed her arms, kept
her lips pressed together for a moment, and then took a sniff. ‘She
is fine. In fact, she is better than fine. If you asked me, and
you’d just brought her in off the street, I would have told you
that this woman was in peak physical condition and certainly had
not just had a run in with an assassin robot.’
    Lucas could feel his eyes
narrow and his lips spread wide, not in a smile, but in a confused
frown. ‘Excuse me?’
    Miranda shrugged her arms and
shoulders, the move very expressive and bodily. She also looked
confused, but then the usual control and barely suppressed
annoyance that always commanded Miranda's expression returned to
her. ‘I don't know, Lucas. The important thing is she is fine. She
is also not human, which might have helped her rebound.’
    ‘ Not human?’ Lucas glanced back
at the woman. She certainly looked human. Though these days that
didn't exactly mean much. The Galaxy was a big place, and if there
was anything the last several centuries had taught humanity, it was
that their idea of an alien had to be expanded a whole lot. He’d
read a little about Earth's history, and for a period there, their
idea of aliens was of the giant headed, beady eye, slimy,
gray-skinned variety with three fingers and a penchant for crashing
into military airbases. In reality, there were so many planets and
so many aliens out there, that the range of forms that life came in
was incredible. Some aliens honestly did look almost exactly like
humans. Some of them could make themselves look exactly like
humans, and yet again others underwent simple surgery to obtain the
same effect, though such surgery was rarely effective. The point
was, you could never be too surprised if the apparent Homo Sapiens
in front of you was in fact a creature from the planet Alpha
Terra.
    That being said, Lucas was
still shocked. After all, Jane just looked . . . he
couldn't quite get a handle on it, but she just looked plain. No,
that wasn't the right word, because she certainly wasn't plain. The
way she looked so fixedly out the windows was intriguing, certainly
not boring. And while she didn't have the kind of standout features
that would see her getting work as a Galactic anchor woman or the
like, she wasn't ugly, even though that was a term he hardly used.
There were so many aliens out there, which such different looks and
concepts of beauty, that ugly didn't mean much these days. By human
standards, while Jane looked normal, and wouldn’t stand out, there
was still something unique and intriguing about her.
    She'd also had a run-in
with an assassin robot and was now apparently completely okay,
which was something Lucas was having trouble believing.
    Now he crossed his arms,
and stared over at Jane, his eyes pressed together, his jaw
set.
    She finally looked around
at him,