“AID. Consider these messages completed by my entry into lintatai. Send to the following addresses accordingly.” He listed the major economic planets where he knew their interests had fallen victim to the Gistar plot. “Oh, and summon my full complement of body servants,” he instructed.

Indowy lived their entire lives in heavy debt from the costs of their education or working tools. If the Darhel group that owned its debts called them in, any Indowy would tolerate, if not blithely, then resignedly, starving to death. Anything for the sake of their clan. They did, however, have their limits. Had any of them realized the state of mind of their Darhel master, nothing short of antimatter weapons pointed right at large bodies of their several clans would have induced them to walk into that room. Unfortunately, none of the five had the faintest glimmer of awareness of that risk.

Indowy had been rather puzzled the first time they heard the human idiom “blue blood.” Having a circulatory system with similar structure to a human’s, through parallel evolution, they had their own equivalents of arterial and venous blood. The latter was a darker shade of indigo than the former, almost purple.

Lalon’s eccentric preference for carved stone flooring ensured that his servants’ blood pooled, instead of soaking into anything, other than the green filaments of photosynthetic symbiote, which sat in forlorn patches on the torn skin and parts. His manic grin, as he was found seated on the floor, retained chunks of pale blue meat caught between his sharklike teeth. He was no longer chewing. Between the silver of his naked fur, the drying blue splotches, and the bits of green, he looked rather like a bizarre, tinsel Christmas tree. If, that is, Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy had decided to celebrate Christmas.