There wasn’t a lot of me left after the war.

I was in a skipship on my way to being deployed when the Drinzit attacked, and I got sucked into a hole in the ship’s wall before the patch system kicked in. My comrades put what was left of me in cryo, and we retreated to Known Space.

My military benefits didn’t cover full body reconstruction—all that was left of me was my head, my torso down to the bottom of my rib cage, and my left arm. My benefits covered jugging and augmenting me into a ship’s brain, but they wouldn’t restore me to my former self. I didn’t want to be tethered to a ship, especially one going back again and again to battle. With someone else’s hands on the controls.

The Art Museum of the Four Known Sentient Species on Kata Space Station offered me a deal. They gave me a whole body with working parts, and, in return, I became both an artwork and a security guard. After my remodel, my skin was opaque until someone pressed the “Show More” button on my pedestal. Then it turned transparent so people could see the workings of my prosthetics, which were stylized and shiny, made not just for utility but for show, with many shades of metal, and light-up nerves and circulatory systems. While I was working, my skin was usually pale stone, like other statues in the collection, but sometimes my skin turned metallic, sometimes space black. The curator usually decided.

I stood like a statue on my pedestal in the front hall near the entrance during the day. Visitors thought I was just another artwork unless they did something wrong. Finger the artwork? I’d come down off my pedestal and zipfreeze you and take you to the security office. Try to steal anything? I was hooked into the surveillance system, keeping track of everything—well, I and three other vets the museum had hired and reconstructed. One of us would stop you.

My new legs gave me the power to mount my pedestal in one jump, and I had the shock absorbers to jump down without problems. Teff, Iliana, and Barb were stationed in other parts of the museum. We spoke with each other on the sec-grid and watched through each other’s eyes if something happened.

At night, we walked security routes, accessed power and nutrition in the museum cafeteria, spent time with each other, always on alert and plugged into the sec-grid. There was a whole station outside the museum, with different quadrants for each of the Four Known Species and docking stations for all kinds of beings. I had visited Kata Station before my deployment. Back then, I’d been interested in everything.

Now I just wanted to stay in the museum. Lots to learn and look at. I could watch people every day, and I didn’t have to talk with them. That suited me.

The day the Drinzit arrived, I was staring across the entrance hall at a statue from Old Yarth. It was from a civilization that was ancient before we left the planet and joined the Four Known Sentients. A Human man, pale stone, stood holding a musical instrument. He had curly hair and straight brows, and though his eyes had no irises or pupils, he seemed to stare back at me. He looked like my best friend Frithy, who had died in the attack on our ship. I hadn’t known Frithy was dead until I’d already made my contract with the art museum and started my reconstruction.

The Drinzit ambassador, a rotund upright shape with six legs, an armored thorax, and a round head with bright faceted eyes and long, whippy antennae, arrived at the museum escorted by Station Administrator Kravs and surrounded by six larval forms of its own species. The Drinzit had been our enemy in the war that had injured me and killed my best friend, but now it was peacetime, and they were negotiating to join the union of the Four Known Sentient Species and turn it into Five.

I was standing statue still when they entered on a waft of scent like unwashed socks. The scent grew stronger as the ambassador flapped its truncated wings, fanning its pheromones out in a cloud around it. Administrator Kravs coughed and pressed a breathing mask to her face, then lowered it and offered a smile to the ambassador. “Each wing of the museum holds artworks from a different Sentient,” she said. “In this way we all study each other, and our union grows in understanding.”

The ambassador hissed. Its larval companions, slender, pale, wispy forms with many legs and small flat eyes, swayed as though the ambassador were singing.

“Is there any particular art you would like to view?” Administrator Kravs asked. She was wearing an over-the-ear translator.

I asked the other guards whether we had a translation program for Drinzit yet. They responded with shock and disgust. All of us had been nearly killed by Drinzit. I had to turn off the sec-grid so I could pay attention to what was happening in the hall.

I couldn’t turn off the churn in my chest as I contemplated the representative of a race that had taken Humans captive, used them as incubators and first meals for their young, and killed so many members of our military.

I wanted to leap down and plunge my enhanced fist into the Drinzit ambassador’s thorax, or wherever it kept what served it for a heart. I wanted to feel its internal organs crush in my fists. I wanted to bathe in its black blood, knowing it and its progeny were dead. The larval forms looked easy to dismember and stomp into paste.

It was the most intense feeling I had had since I woke in the medbed after the attack on our ship.

As though it felt my rage, the Drinzit turned toward me. It stared up at me, I thought, though with those compound eyes, one never knew exactly where a Drinzit was looking. It hissed.

“Is that an artwork?” Administrator Kravs glanced at me. “Yes and no.”

Feelings churned through what was left of me. I stood perfectly still as the ambassador lifted a hand-leg and pointed deeper into the museum. The administrator, the ambassador, and the larvae headed that direction, chattering and hissing.

My skin turned space black. I stared at the ancient statue of the Yarth boy and pulled in measured breaths until my heart slowed.

Perhaps one of the others would kill it.