THE VIDIIAN DOCTOR WENT BY THE NAME OF DANARA PEL. The Entity knew her. Not of her, but knew her, the way it had known Maj Culluh. It did not understand how it came by this knowing, but merely accepted this fact.
For over two thousand years, the Vidiians had battled a dreadful disease they called the Phage. Their desperate drive to stay alive as a race had prompted them to do terrible things. Often, they killed innocent aliens and harvested their organs. Skin grafts were necessary to replenish flesh as it died and sloughed off. They ought not to have survived, but they had, and their medical knowledge was almost unsurpassed in this quadrant.
As was the hate and fear they engendered.
The Entity had a deep connection to the Vidiians. What was it? It had lost something, had given it up. Had it once been a flesh-being, and had its organs harvested? That was close, but it was not quite right. There was a nobility about the Entity’s loss, a sense of yielding that transcended victimization. What was it, what was it?
The thought went away as it regarded Danara Pel. She still bore the scars of the illness that had ravaged her body, but was no longer a macabre patchwork of other beings’ parts. She was cured of the Phage.
And imprisoned.
When the Phage had been cured, it had seemed like such a blessing at first. Kuros and his group of mercenary intellectuals had offered a cure in exchange for Vidiian medical knowledge. It had seemed so little to ask. But as with so many things, there was a dark side to the request. In earlier times, the Vidiians were known as educators, artists, explorers. Once the Phage had been cured, many raced to embrace these neglected passions, looking forward to the chance to contribute to, instead of prey upon, the other aliens in the quadrant. But others had gotten used to the casual brutality of a mind-set that rationalized murdering fellow sentient beings and using their organs.
Dark matter, floating through this system, had escalated the conflicts. Civil war had erupted. At a time when the species ought to be rejoicing in its deliverance, they were fighting one another. The Sodality had imploded and the Vidiians were easy prey for a variety of alien races desirous of revenge.
So it was that Danara Pel, compassionate doctor who had never wanted anything more than to help her people, was a slave. She was forced to use her knowledge to perform experimental surgeries and vivisections to appease cruel masters. At least the Vidiians had done what they had to survive. This alien species, the Charasin, merely wanted conquest.
They, too, were infested with dark matter, sensed the Entity. Their commander, one Pektar Sirumal, was quite mad because of it. And Danara Pel, a cancer spreading through her internal organs, knew it. The Entity felt terror coming off the woman in waves as she sliced and cut and speared and dissected. The victim moaned softly on the table. The white cloth on the table had turned bright purple with its blood.
The Entity knew pain. The pain of the victim, and the pain of the doctor.
And it knew anger at the dark matter, anger at those who valued torment over healing, subjugation over art. It did not drift upon Danara Pel, it charged her, hurtling through her system and ripping the dark matter from her cells. Danara gasped and staggered backward, a bloody instrument in her hand. Recognition passed over her face, and the Entity realized that Danara knew it the way it knew Danara. But it did not linger for confirmation.
Borne by the heat of its anger, it swept through the ship. It hurtled through the bodies of the slaves and masters alike, gathering the wrong things and neutralizing their darkness. It paused for a moment, hovering beside Pektar Sirumal, repulsed by the dark matter writhing in his body and systematically devouring his brain. If it removed the dark matter, there was not enough natural matter to keep him alive. To purge him would be to kill him.
The anger faded. The more familiar sensation of compassion took its place. It had to be done. The mutated dark matter had to be retrieved. The Entity would kill as kindly as it could.
Gently, like the softest of rain showers, the Entity descended on the leader of the Charasin. They were a hard people, and their ideology was not one of understanding, but they were not monsters. No species was, though individuals could become monstrous. The Entity coursed through Pektar’s system, as tenderly as it could, and in his angry, infected brain, it planted thoughts of pleasure and calm.
Pektar stiffened, then relaxed into his command chair. He saw before him scenes from a long-ago childhood. Faces long dead smiled at him. Slowly, softly, the Entity plucked the dark matter from his brain. There was not enough natural matter to take over the higher functions, so the Entity told Pektar to sleep, sleep deeply and well. And as he closed his eyes for the last time, he thought he saw another face, one he did not know; that of a beautiful woman standing before him, wreathed in gold, with a smile of tenderness upon her lips and compassion in her blue, blue eyes.