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xenoarchaeology would be able to read Ancient Terellian, or a doctor of linguistics would know everything about sociology. It was the logic that insisted a professor of Twin Species or Pre-Fleet Molran architecture would know the first thing about setting up a mobile materials analysis lab.
    And it was the self-same logic that had placed Janya Adeneo in charge of the entire research and analysis quadrant.
    Unfortunately, the ship’s automated systems and laboratory equipment were so intuitive and user-friendly, Janya’s modest powers of deduction were enough to enable her to simply guess her way around them the first few times, with no major slip-ups. After that, it became impossible for her to convince anyone that she was just making it up as she went along and was in fact utterly unqualified to do any of the generic ‘sciencey-work’ to which she had apparently been assigned in perpetuity.
    And, like all such academic people – and as was also invariably ignored by everybody at every level of intellect – Janya’s highly-focussed intelligence was accompanied by an equal and opposite gaping vacuum of knowledge in many other areas of human endeavour. For example, knowledge of sports. And what to safely say when someone asks “how are things?”.
    How were things, anyway?
    These, then, comprised the first three characteristics anyone noticed about Janya. She was tiny, she was ferociously intelligent, and in an age when skin and bone and organs could be replaced and all but the staunchest Zhraaki removed even their umbilical scars, she wore the faint pale stripes left behind on her face and hands like the badges of honour they were. She had , however, had her missing pinky finger repaired with a slightly-mismatched replacement, because it was one thing to make a statement but one had to be rational.
    When people asked her why she didn’t have them removed, she told them she had suffered for them and that pain would have been for nothing if they vanished without a trace. One morning she would look in the mirror and not remember the pain of those cuts, and on that day she would step out of her door and let herself make exactly the same stupid mistake she had made the first time, back on Judon.
    When people asked her what that mistake had been, she said, “I hesitated.”
    She sometimes woke up to the sound of knives parting skin.
    Another sub-one-ten job at the plant , she confirmed silently to herself, noting the fabrication and configuration log as it came in appended to Waffa’s report. Like the Chief of Security and Operations she had noted the rough correlation between baking time and cake quality, and knew that an eejit that came out so quickly was not likely to signify good news even if he wasn’t a skinful of raw dough. Also like Waffa, she had no real idea of why the plant aborted its configurations when it did or spat out eejits of the flaw-types it did, or what most of the log content actually meant. As part of her ‘research’ into the damage and the eejit situation, however, she had done a bit of work listing the eejit complement by flaw type, and cross-referencing it with whatever key-words seemed to be repeated throughout the logs. It was agonising work, but she was beginning to think she was onto something.
    Yes, ‘research’ , she thought with a little roll of her eyes. She’d done a lot of that in the course of her academic career. She’d come to know what it was and what it meant. Or she thought she had. Back in those dreamlike days of yore, it had meant the systematic investigation of a given subject in order to ascertain or revise facts or theories in pursuit of my educational progress . Then, aboard post-Accident Astro Tramp 400 , she’d found out that ‘research’ actually meant doing sciencey magic for between one and five hours and then solving whatever problem they’ve asked me to ‘research’ .
    She often indulged in regret for her lost life at Judon Research Outpost, which had