The most amazing thing is that he differs from a human being only by a slightly different knee structure, and by his feet, which have only four toes. Like humans, there are five fingers on his hands, and his face looks more like an elf from fairy tales, with light lilac glowing eyes and pointed tips of ears. It's idiotic to make aliens three-fingered! Try to hold the rifle with three fingers and shoot at the same time. Igrodels suck! And his fingers, just like a pianist's, are long and flexible. And there are steel claws on the gloves of the skaf. At first I didn't understand why, I thought it was a weapon, until I saw how it worked on the toolbox. There are two times fewer buttons there than my father's, and twice as many buttons themselves. I once asked my dad how cool Uncle Tael's omny tool was, and he just rolled his eyes.

They sang a round dance and pulled me to the table, there is a cake. I saw through the window how his mother brought him and put him on the veranda of the group. A hefty cake, by the way, though, for twenty-one children's mouthfuls — in one bite. A hefty pot of compote was brought here from the dining room. And here, as it turned out, neither Turians nor Quarians have any dextroamines. And the blood of all races, without exception, is red, differing only in shades and composition. Of course, all races have dietary restrictions. So my cake is universal, suitable for all races ... which, alas, does not add to its taste.

Chapter 2.1 About the races of Citadel space.

That reminds me! One day Uncle Duck came to visit us with his family: his wife and three children. His eldest sons are the same age as my older brothers, and since we are also neighbors, they are bosom friends, and all the mischief in the village is the work of my brothers and their Turian friends, plus Dr. Ray's daughters, as it turned out, are also our neighbors. Her name is Rayan T'rann. Uncle Duck's wife's name is Kaadi, and she's a former soldier of the Black Watch, an incredibly cool woman. So, when they all came to us for the first time, my younger brother turned exactly one year old.

The first thing that caught my eye was that the Turians have FIVE fingers on their hands, not four. When I was stunned to see this miracle and, confused with excitement, asked Duck about it, the answer amazed me... In fact, male Turians also have five fingers on their hands, just the ring finger and the little finger fused together. It happened in some very ancient times, when the Turians on Palaven still lived in trees. Men mostly hunted, usually on the surface. It is impossible to determine when the mutation occurred, but the four-toed ones gained an advantage in hunting due to a stronger grip, according to the theory. Nobody knows what really happened.

The women did not come down from the trees and were mainly engaged in gathering. Therefore, women still have five fingers and toes, the fingers themselves are much longer and more mobile than men, although the foot itself is smaller. The foot of the Turians looks amazing. As far as I have seen Nain in the pool and in the pictures on the net, four fingers are looking forward, and the index and little fingers are almost the same size, thick, with powerful sharp claws, the middle and ring fingers are much shorter and with flat thick nails! The thumb is turned back, and in men, by and large, it has completely atrophied, turning into a heel. But for women, although in a heavily stripped-down version, it has been preserved, and Turians can firmly grasp a pliable surface like a tree with their foot, and even hang upside down without any harm or consequences for themselves. Nain has shown me this trick many times.

We ate the cake and drank the compote. There's a really awesome pool here in the garden, and I love swimming. In general, the Azari love the pool the most, they feel like fish in it, you can't drive them out. Then there are people, it depends on individual preferences. Batarians are indifferent. Turians rather do not like, although they swim with pleasure on the shoals. But our Drell doesn't wear it. They built a dry room for him in the pantry, where the humidity is about five percent, and there are some salts in the air that are useful for drells. This is probably the prevention of Kapral's syndrome. And his name is Feron!

Two months later. The Whisper Ranch

It's time for the holidays, so I'm sitting on the porch of our house right now, with an album on my lap, and pretending to draw. In fact, I shamelessly warm my ears listening to the conversation between my father and his assistant, the Batarian Koel Natol, sitting on wicker chairs in the middle of the lawn. Gina is sitting next to him, with the same album on her lap, and, sticking out her tongue from diligence, she is drawing something with colored pencils. Actually, she has a real gift for drawing. What I do with effort, she does somehow by herself. After introducing her to the album and showing her the basics, I was just amazed at how fast she was progressing. She should be an artist! Even now, when I looked at her album, I saw our cat lying on the grass with a lazy expression on his face, and all this in small strokes, and so accurately conveys the mood.... Alas, I can never do that.

"Listen, Kol," my father says, "What's wrong with you, you haven't been yourself for the second week, what happened?"

"I haven't heard from my brother for a long time. Neither from himself, nor from his family. Saer is worried!"

"I thought you said his contract was ending. I got him engaged to us, agreed with Tael, he punched the management. Everyone agrees to accept him and his family."

"That seems to be the problem. Someone must have betrayed my brother for lathering up to us, and the Hegemony looks at it askance."

"This way, normal conditions would be created for the reasonable, and they would not have to catch their own population trying to run away wherever they look, just to get away from their native state."

"This is what you have here at RM, just like in the legends. At first, we all couldn't believe that this was happening. I kept waiting for a trick, when they would start to squeeze. It was only a year later that I believed that everything that was written in the contract was being fulfilled."

"The main resource of any state or corporation, even a family, is people. These are not factories, steamships, ships and junk. These are the ones who create, produce, mine, build, transport, and raise the next generation. Invest in the sensible ones, and you'll get a hundredfold return. RM has been pursuing such a policy for two hundred years, so the corporation is in third place in the list of the strongest companies in the Alliance of Systems, and it is included in the hundred of Citadel Space. What about the Hegemony?"

"I'm not arguing, Michael. I'm not arguing... I'm just worried about my brother."

"Shall we have a drink? Would you like some cognac?"

"What? The real one? Terran?"

"Yeah! Moldovan! Maybe not the best, but still. A friend gave it to me, my friends on Earth bought it, and they sent the box to me."

"Ah... pour it. I'll try again."

My father came into the house, and Coel stared at the sky with a kind of detached look. His emotions were filled with longing and fear, but there was a hint of hope somewhere. That's right, Uncle Coel is a normal man. Kind, hardworking, good-looking, straight arms. Dad is very pleased with him. And Hegemony is just such a dump with slavery, with bonded contracts... wolfish capitalism in all its glory. I once asked him,

"Uncle Coel, why do your people put up with all this, and not take up arms and restore order in the country?"

He replied that only overseers, police, army and family members of corporate heads can have weapons in the Hegemony. The rest, if caught with a gun, immediately die. Well, except for the pirate squads, those are actually supported and under the roof of the same corporations. In general, hopelessness. That leaves the Batarians to run anywhere, mostly to the Omega.

"Da-ad! Da-ad! Look how I drew Barsik!" Gina came skipping up to him.

"Let me see," Coel took the album and stared at the drawing with admiration.

"Do you like it?" Gina asked, looking lovingly at her father.

"Very!" Koel replied and hugged his daughter tightly to him.

He loved his daughter. He loved me so much that I could feel it from afar. My father loves me very much too, but here it was just painful. Gina feels it and twists the ropes out of her father just like that. Even now, he's clutching her so tightly, as if he's afraid she'll disappear.

"Daddy! You'll strangle me!" Gina wheezed.

Then my father came out of the house, holding a bottle and two glasses in his left hand, and a saucer with sliced lemon in his right. He put everything on the table, sat down in an armchair, opened a bottle that made a "pou" sound, and poured the golden liquid into glasses.

"For luck, Col! Your brother will need it!"

"Good luck, Michael!"

They clinked glasses. Jean is back on the porch with me, and she's drawing something on a new piece of paper again, glancing at me from time to time. Her emotions are filled with fun and some kind of... adoration. Why she treats me like this, I just don't understand.

I myself am red-haired and green-eyed, and my hair is such a bright color that I stand out among the kindergarten kids like a fly agaric on moss. Seen from afar. And my eye color is malachite green, bright and saturated. The doctors were perplexed at first, they said that people do not have such an eye color. Dad also kept wondering who I was like, there had never been any redheads in the family, either on my father's side or on my mother's. The father himself is light-haired and blue-eyed, a true Aryan. Mom has dark blond hair, with almost steel-gray eyes. And all the brothers, who are more like their father, who are like their mother, I'm the only one with red hair. Anyway, we decided to check it out. They took my blood, went to the hospital in the city, did an analysis with the construction of a model for deciphering the genetic code and got a blue-eyed blonde. We were very surprised, rechecked, and the result remained unchanged. Then Uncle Duck and Aunt Ray got caught up in professional curiosity: How can this be? We picked up the mother's medical record, checked all the events during pregnancy and found out that, at the sixth month, an accident occurred at the enrichment complex: a pipeline with some kind of terrible chemical reagent for extracting element zero from the rock broke! A lot of intelligent people were poisoned, it's a good thing they didn't die. Well, my mother was working in a factory emergency room at the time, and while helping the injured, she also got poisoned. That's how this reagent affected me. How many arguments did we have in the kitchen about this?... Exposure to the "zero element" seemed to be a plus, but so far no effects have been noticeable. Anyway, it's not bad for me to be a redhead.

"Hey, hey! Eugene! Ji-in! Let's go for a walk!" There was a loud shout from the gate. Nain was swinging on it like on a swing.

"And where will we go?" Jean asked.

"It doesn't matter. Let's go to Uncle Tael, let him tell us a story about the Fleet."

"Come on!" I say and throw the album on the porch. Gina puts hers carefully, before closing and putting the pencils in the box.

"Keep an eye on them!" I hear my father's voice and, turning around, I see Barsik trotting after us.

Chapter 3 It seems to be an ordinary life.

Eugene (Mendoir, October-November 2358)

Picnic

The city of Leonov, October 10, 2358

I'm sitting high, I'm looking far away! Even above one and a half meters. Between my legs is the back of my head with blond curly hair, and under my ass are skinny boyish shoulders. I hold my brother's forehead with my hands and prevent him from turning his head, which he periodically resents.

"Little fox! Take your hands off, I can't see anything under my feet! Come on! There are roots all around! Eugene! Let's crash now!"

"And you squint your eyes! That's how it will be seen!"

"Am I a mud crab? My eyes are not on stalks!"

"Then I'll hold on to your hair. They're long and soft, just for my hands!"

"No, not by the hair! Little fox, you're going to rip them all out for me!"

"And I won't rip anything out! You've got them firmly in place!" Vasil is walking next to us, blazing with merriment, listening to our bickering. For my brothers, Vaska, and for me, for some time, Vasenka. That's what I called her in the summer, when I asked my brothers to go fishing, but they didn't want to take her. So I plugged it in. I cried in her lap, she felt sorry for me and put pressure on my brothers, but they can't refuse her. They took me with them. I've been calling her Vasenka ever since.

"Little fox, what are you going to do there?"

"I'm going to give you a head massage, Deniska!" I say and start gently massaging my brother's head with my fingers.

"Then I'm definitely going to fall!"

"I'll fall for you! Okay, you drop me, so you can still spill two buckets of barbecue, and not only will I not forgive you, no one will forgive you!"

"Ha ha ha! That's for sure, we won't forgive!" Vasya laughs loudly.

"Oh, right? Are you ganging up on poor me? U-u-u! A woman's conspiracy! I won't carry you back in the evening, you'll know, you red-haired arrogant!"

"Well, Dishya!" I hug my brother's head and speak softly in his ear. "I'm sorry, asshole, I won't do this anymore!"

"I'll give you a "I won't"! Do the massage next, and I'll keep a better eye on my feet. Hehe!"

"Ah-ha-ha-ha! Comedians! No circus is needed!" Vasya bursts out.

I look at her with a smile, gently massaging my brother's head. He grunts with pleasure and slowly turns his head, putting different places under my fingers.

We're all going on a picnic together. Everyone is my family, the whole Tanir family, Tael'Rigar, Aunt Ray with her daughter Vasil and Gina with her mother Saer, plus, Polkasha and Bars. Today is October 10, colony Day, on this truly historic day for Mendoir, 13 years ago, the first colonist set foot on its surface, and it doesn't really matter that there were sixty thousand of them. Gina's father is the senior shift engineer on duty today, and his brother Bael is his assistant. Yes, his brother was found, he flew in at the end of June. At that time, my father was urgently taken to the port of Gagarin along with Koel, right from Deniska's birthday. When they returned a couple of hours later, a tall, thin Batarian, who looked exactly like Coel, only ten years younger, and a young, thin Batarian, his brother's wife, got out of our flyer with them. And they don't have any children yet.

A regiment of gray shaggy torpedoes rushes through the park, pestering other groups of walkers, but no one is afraid of him. On the contrary, everyone is clutching and trying to shove delicious things, which this unscrupulous eater of food uses, especially since he knows most of the residents of the town, because he often walks with his older brothers in the park. Polkan is a unique dog: the only one in the entire Mendoire from the "Guardian" program. These dogs were jointly developed by Terran and Salarian geneticists, according to a common program for the protection of hazardous industries and special facilities. And my maternal uncle brought it to the folder as a gift from the command, in connection with his retirement. It's inconceivable how he got it, these dogs are still microscopically few. Well, yes, there is probably a lot available to the Rear Admiral, Deputy Commander of the Fifth Fleet of the Alliance of Systems. My mother's name was Hackett when she was a girl. Can you guess who my uncle is? It's not surprising that he pushed all the hemorrhoids of the Alliance onto the hero in the game, it's so family-friendly!