The rats were a peculiar quirk of the Nostalgia for Infinity; quite possibly unique aboard any lighthugger. They were only fractionally more intelligent than their feral ancestors, but what made them useful - what turned them from pest into utility - was that they were biochemically linked into the ship’s command matrix. Every rat had specialised pheromonal receptors and transmitters which allowed it to receive commands and transmit information back to the ship, encoded into complex secreted molecules. They foraged for waste, eating virtually anything organic which was not nailed down or still
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