The turning point of our EOT engagement in Teskor came on the morning of the seventh day, after we’d done our night and morning patrols, and I’d dutifully sent a report about nothing up to our platoon leader. I took Sanchez with me, to check out a barn I was curious about. I wasn't suspicious about any funky hamster activity, just curious to see the inside of a hamster barn. As we walked past the school, a group of hamster kids were in the yard, kicking a ball that looked like it was made from the hamster equivalent of duct tape. We knew the hamsters weren't getting any new luxuries shipped in from offworld; the Kristang allowed only basic medical supplies to make the trip down from orbit, everything else that was hamster related was supposed to be going up to orbit, one way. The kids probably had a soccer ball that went flat, and they tried to fix it with duct tape.

The barn wasn’t anything special, it was built from metal girders and some kind of extruded plastic sheets the Ruhar used everywhere. The exterior color was red, which I thought was interesting; maybe painting barns red was another almost universal idea between alien species. At first I thought the barn was a type of chicken coop, until my eyes adjusted to the dim light. Then it got weird. There were animals being raised there, on racks along the sides, and it smelled like a chicken coop, or a hog farm. The weird thing was each animal, about two meters long and a meter across, had a silver cap where its head should be, and there were wires and tubes leading into the wall in front of each animal. The animals rested in cradles, I noticed some of the animals further away were smaller, perhaps younger? What was truly weird was the silence, no clucking of chickens or grunting of pigs, only the whirring of fans and electric pumps. And there was my new buddy Lester Cornhut, trotting up to me from the far end of the barn, with a friendly wave. "Greeting, Joseph Bishop," he called out.

"Greetings, Lester Cornhut." I must have pronounced his name correctly, because he smiled and gave me a short bow. "What is this place?" I asked. "What are those," I pointed to the strange, whatever they were, "animals?"

"Animals? Ah. These are not animals. Ruhar do not eat animals, we have long considered that to be," Lester paused to choose his words carefully, "barbaric." He gave an apologetic smile. I wondered if what he'd said in Ruhar had been even worse than the translated word I heard.

"They sure look like animals to me," Sanchez said behind me. "They're moving."