Clearly, the interrogators had been in a creative mood when they were ordered to extract as much information as possible from this spy.

Colour-coded projections floated in the air around the creature, simultaneously revealing his inner structure. The Bandati species were bipedal, about the same size and approximate shape as a young human adult – and there the similarity ended. The scout's four primary limbs, apart from the wings, were long and narrow, the arms tapering to long, fine fingers, while his narrow, deceptively frail-looking frame was coated in fine dark hairs. The skull was like an oval laid on its side, the mouth small and puckered, while the skin, on closer inspection, had the appearance and texture of tightly coiled black rope. But the first things one noticed above all else were the iridescent, semi-translucent wings that entirely dwarfed the rest of the creature's frame.

If Trader had ever seen a terrestrial bat, he might have recognized a certain passing resemblance. Even now, the scout's tiny mouth twisted in a shrill of agony as a shimmering blade of energy sliced into the ligatures and bony struts connecting one of his five remaining wings to his upper body.

The eyes, rather than being compound in the manner of the insects the Bandati had been partly modelled after, were round black orbs mounted in a fur-covered face that featured a variety of exotic sense organs designed – tens of millennia before – by the Bandati's legendary predecessors. Their lungs were equipped to draw in extraordinary quantities of oxygen to power them while in flight.

Trader watched the proceedings from a vantage point just outside the interrogation chamber's entrance, where the ship's liquid atmosphere was maintained at pressures substantial enough to crush an unprotected human – should any have ventured within a few thousand light-years – and was prevented from re-flooding the chamber by a shaped energy field spanning the entrance.