Blaring alarms rudely interrupted the meeting, causing the assembled station security officers to jump up - or whatever their species equivalent was to a sudden abandonment of their chairs.

Ahead of everyone was chief of security Nierkam - he slithered out the door with lightning speed, shot down the corridor and reached the control center in seconds. There, he immediately got up to his full height to get an overview of the large room with its normally dozens of staff and hundreds of status screens. The remaining officers on duty were in turmoil and most of them were hopping between multiple terminals while also yelling into their communication devices.

Behind Nierkam, everyone else from the meeting rushed in and dispersed towards their stations.

He then spotted the interim chief of security Twelve-Stones cutting through the chaos towards him, and with her considerable size she had no issues doing so quickly. “Sir, we’ve had a high energy event on deck fourteen, wing J. It was an extreme disturbance and it appears one of the aftereffects is the release of dangerous amounts of class-A toxic gasses.”

“The humans again?”, Nierkam yelled in frustration.

“It seems so. They’ve contacted us already, they said they’ve contai-”

“No!” He interrupted the interim chief. Then Nierkam addressed the whole room and commanded: “Comms; order the evacuation of the affected wing. Environmental safety; when the evacuation is done, do a vacuum-clean of the atmosphere of the whole laboratory. Riot control; get the closest eight teams there and make sure to detain every human present.”

He then pointed at Twelve-Stones. “And you are coming with me.”

“What? Where are we going?”

“To those labs. This time I will investigate this personally.”

Several minutes and a ride on a priority train later, they arrived within wing J on deck fourteen. The chief of security, the interim chief and a small team of guards quickly traversed the otherwise empty main corridor towards the testing laboratory the humans were renting.

As they came into the main access corridor, they stood before a massive bulkhead. Without a spoken command, two of the guards went to unlock an access panel on the wall to disable the lockdown on the hidden terminal.

The bulkhead then slowly split open and Nierkam immediately took in the distinct smell that always lingered in rooms that had been exposed to the vacuum of space. He presumed that it had to be what the blackness between stars smelled like.

“Let us see what was going on here. Where was the center of the disturbance?”

“It’s this way, sir”, Twelve-Stones replied as she looked it up on the multi-purpose screen device mounted to one of her forearms. Then she took the lead, hastily opening any door that stood in the way with her security clearance until the group reached a particularly spacious room that had an armoured containment chamber suspended in its center.

Nierkam scanned the room and it was clear that something violent had happened in it. The containment chamber not only sat crooked on its supports, but all of its walls were deformed - they now bulged outwards and had large cracks in several places. He couldn’t even tell what colour it had been as the blackened metal had obviously been damaged by extreme heat.

He made a circle around the chamber and then got back up. “Now we’ve got them.”

“Sir?”

“This is incontestable evidence of weapons research.” The chief of security let out a high-pitched hacking laugh. “All those other incidents and all their lies - we can finally be done with diplomacy and kick them out, maybe even ban them from civilized space all together.”

Twelve-Stones didn’t seem to share his momentary joy. “I’ve seen the reports of the previous incidents as well and I wouldn’t have come to the conclusion that they were false.”

“They are. I always knew that the humans were concealing something nefarious behind palatable but crazy rumours.”

“Shall we continue the investigation, sir? I can send for the one responsible for the research done here.”

“Yes, please do that.”

It didn’t take long until three humans were led in by as many heavily armoured riot control agents.

One agent said: “Sir, these three claim to be in charge.”

Two of the humans were clothed in typical human business garb and one was wearing a white overcoat that concealed nearly their whole body. Nierkam looked each of them up and down and he imagined their reactions to show nervousness.

He did not give them time to speak and instead commanded: “Tell me what happened.”

It was one of the business people that spoke up - Nierkam had mused that she was female from her facial shape and what he could discern of her figure, but he was sure when he heard her tone of voice.

“We were doing a test of a food heating appliance and had-”

“No”, he interrupted her sharply, “stop with the lies. Your cover story doesn’t hold up, I know that you’re not working on common household devices as you claim. Tell me the truth.”

The three humans exchanged glances. The business woman said: “We were never lying, this is what we are working on. We’re tasked with improving or newly developing features for handheld and countertop electric kitchen devices.”

“So you insist that a hand blender can cause the atmospheric incineration of a whole room? Or that a malfunctioning ‘waffle’ iron was able to knock out the power grid of the whole deck? And what was that other one - a ‘coffee’ maker punched a hole through several walls? We’ve had ten incidents with your lab so far, all of them with equally ridiculous reports!”

He stretched himself up as tall as possible so he was nearly at eye-height with the women.

“And now you really want me to believe that a containment chamber with a level three protective rating was destroyed by an oven?”

“It’s not level three”, the person in the white coat suddenly interjected, “it’s level five. We had it replaced last week.”

Nierkam slowly turned towards Twelve-Stones. He didn’t need to say anything for her to check her arm-mounted device and then confirm what the human had said with a gesture.

A searing heat pulsed down his neck all the way to the tip of his tail. This would mean that, if what the humans had done hadn’t been contained, it would probably have ripped a hole through more than one deck in either direction.

He addressed the human in the white coat: “What kind of weapon are you creating here?”

“It’s not a weapon. It’s a …” They had used an unfamiliar word.

“A what? What is that?”

The business woman explained: “It’s a heating appliance for a particular range of foods.”

“I do not believe any of this.”

“We have one right there”, the human in the white coat said while pointing at the large window to an adjacent room. “I can demonstrate what it does.”

“Absolutely not!”

“It’s not dangerous. It’s a different model, it lacks the feature that we are trying to implement.”

Nierkam glanced at the warped containment chamber and then back at the human. “Fetch it, but do not activate it.” He then motioned one of the guards to follow them.

The human hurried over to another door and disappeared through it with the guard in tow. A moment later they both came back, with the human now carrying a rectangular device in their hands. They handed it over to Nierkam as soon as they came close enough.

He quickly inspected the weighty device - it had a plastic shell but through a slit on the top he could see that the inside was metal, which it had to be full of for it to be this dense.

“See, you take this here”, the human in the lab coat held up a thin square piece of indiscernible organic material, “and put it in the slot. Then you push the button to get …”

They had used another unfamiliar word, but it was very close to the previous one. Nierkam looked down at the thing he was holding - there was a chance that it could be some sort of bomb. Then he glanced at the item the human offered.

“This is food?”

“Yeah, it’s … “

Another new word, different from the two others. He still took the square piece and put it in the slot of the device.

“Sir”, Twelve-Stones objected without saying it.

He quickly told her: “They are lying, you know. This thing cannot possibly cause that much destruction.”

“Even if it is less - you are holding it in your hands, sir.”

Nierkam handed the device back to the human in the white coat and took a bow to slide some distance away. “Demonstrate its function”, he commanded.

The human awkwardly balanced it on one arm to push a lever on the side of the device which made the organic piece sink completely into it. Nierkam could then sense from where he stood that something was happening inside there. But not even a second later, the piece of food sprung back up with a jolt.

He slid closer again and made himself as tall as possible. A new aroma filled the air that was actually quite pleasant - it carried hints of roasted seeds and caramelized sugar. He inspected the piece of human food that had been processed and saw that its outsides had been carbonized. When he picked it up, he noticed that it had not only become too hot to hold for long, but it had also become harder and more rigid.

Nierkam could not keep his voice from wavering. “Your device thoroughly cooked this food in less than a second.”

“Yeah exactly”, the other human clad in business clothes spoke up with surprising ferocity, “that’s how we advertise our current model. But for our coming top line model we need to push it further. We learned that our competitor will lay claim on the millisecond- soon. So we decided to beat them by one full order of magnitude before they launch their product.”

“What? Why?”

“So it’s faster than theirs!”

“No, I mean why would you attempt to create such a device? This is horribly unsafe, with the amount of energy you’d have to dump into the food in that short of a timeframe-” Nierkam stopped himself. Then he turned to the ruined containment chamber. Could it truly be that they had only tested this insane new model?

“Oh sure, the prototypes are still a bit dangerous, but we do have the time down to two microseconds. The mishap today was just an unfortunate chain reaction after the internal force fields failed. In the end it caused an uncontrolled discharge of the capacitors and it flash-vaporized itself.”

After hearing that, Nierkam stared at the device in the arms of the human in the white overcoat. How had he not noticed that it was obviously not plugged into the station's power grid? No matter if those humans had wanted or not - with so much energy stored in such a small volume, they practically made a bomb that doubled as a cooking appliance.

“We are leaving!” He yelled out the command without looking at any of his subordinates. Then he slithered out of the laboratory and away from those insane humans as fast as he could.

Outside the bulkhead, he waited for Twelve-Stones. As soon as he spotted her, she drily exclaimed:“No wonder the humans do not have many research stations of their own.”

Utterly exasperated, he replied: “By everything that lights up the void, if we don’t reinforce everything surrounding their wing including the superstructure through the decks, we might soon not have one either.”