"Is there anything I can do?" I looked around the medical compartment with a frown. There were tubes and scary-looking robot things everywhere, I sure as hell wouldn't want to be a patient in this hospital.

Doctor Skippy disparaged my offer of help. "Unless you have a thorough understanding of Thuranin medical pods, no. Joe, I've got this. It looks scary, it's also fairly sophisticated medical technology, human physiology is pretty simple so these cases are easy. Go do something useful, and let me work."

"All right. We're not leaving these people alone. I'll get Major Simms to assign people shifts here-"

"Totally unnecessary, Joe."

"Physically unnecessary, maybe, Skippy, this is a human thing. I want our people here to know they're not alone. When they wake up, there needs to be someone here."

"A human thing, fine, whatever." Skippy relented.

"Great. What's next? Let's check out the crew quarters on this bucket. They, uh, do have crew quarters, right?" Given the profound weirdness of the Thuranin obsession with cybernetics, maybe they slept standing up, plugged into the wall or something.

"They do have individual quarters. There is one down the hall to the right."

We walked down the hall, and a door slid open. I stepped in. "Oh, boy. This could be a problem." The quarters were nicely set up; a bed, cabinets built into the walls, a closet, and a bathroom with a shower, a table and one chair. The features of the compartment were not the problem. The problem was they were all Thuranin-sized. The bed wouldn't fit me unless I hung my legs off the side. The ceiling was maybe six and a half feet tall, some of our crew would need to be careful not to bump their heads. To take a shower, I'd need to kneel on the floor, with my legs sticking out.

"I don't know," Adams said with a smile, "it looks cozy to me."

"Cozy like warm and comfortable, or cozy like a real estate ad that really means cramped and depressing?" I asked.

"The second one." Adams opened the closet door. "Huh. They don't go in much for fashion." All the outfits were the same dull gray and blue gray the sleeping Thuranin had been wearing.

"What the hell," I shrugged, "we'll make do. Everyone gets their own quarters, that's luxury enough."

"Sir?" Adams prodded me, "the food situation?"

"Oh, yeah, good point. Skippy, show us the mess hall, or I guess it's a galley on a ship."

"There isn't one, Joe."

"No galley?" I shared a puzzled look with Adams, "then where do they eat?"

"In private," Skippy explained, "the Thuranin consider most things that remind them of their biological past to be taboo, particularly biological functions like eating. Consuming food is done in private, in their sleeping compartments, like this one."