But as she held him she took the vials of mnemonic fluid from his waist, and drank them one by one. And she took the Squeem from its cloak bag – it wriggled in her fingers, cold and very alien – and, overcoming her disgust, swallowed it down.
In the last moments, the Spline’s great eyelid closed.
Accompanied by Lieutenant-Commander Erdac, Commissary Drith stepped gingerly through the transfer tunnel and into the damaged Spline eye.
Drith’s brow furrowed, sending a wave of delicate creases over her shaved scalp. It was bad enough to be immersed inside the body of a living creature like this, without being confronted by the gruesome sight the salvage teams had found here. Still, it had been a prize worth retrieving.
Erdac said, ‘You can see how the Squeem fish consumed this young gunner, from inside out. It kept alive that way, long enough anyhow for it to serve as a beacon to alert us when this Spline returned to service in human space. And there was enough of the mnemonic fluid left in the gunner’s body to—’
-Resplendent, "Breeding Ground"