Justification

The camera focuses in on a dimly lit room -- clearly someone's living quarters, and clearly not Mala's. The walls are decorated with various official looking achievement plaques. A large wooden nightstand can be seen; on it lays an unlit lamp, a long whip, several pairs of handcuffs, and a small bottle with a pump dispenser cap.

A large four-poster bed is the centerpiece of the room, and Mala sits on its edge, completely naked and uncovered except for a pair of black stylish, strappy, high-heeled sandals on her feet. Damp with perspiration, her skin glistens in the dim light. Her slender form appears to rest uneasily as she sits. Both of her wrists are half-circled by indented bands in her skin, as though they had very recently been bound. Sections of her upper torso, particularly the tops of her shoulders, are lashed rather haphazardly in a deep red color -- definite signs of damage inflicted by some form of whipping.

Behind her, in the center of the bed, lays the naked body of a man who looks to be at least twice Mala's age. In spite of this, the body appears to be in fine physical shape -- or at least it was, when its inhabitant was alive. In the center of his chest, directly below the sternum, a long dagger appears to be pushed in to the hilt. The man's facial expression is frozen in a state of terror, with both his mouth and his eyes held open, as they presumably were in his final living moments.

Mala's voice is a bit deeper than usual. Her voice quivers with anger as she speaks toward the recorder.

I couldn't do this and not get proof.

As I continued to extract bits of information from my high-level source, I used that information to dig deeper into CONCORD's private archives. Only earlier today did I finally link the prior undercover identity of the man I had been looking for, to the man's true identity. This man, as fate would have it, turned out to be this same high-level source -- one of the men with whom I'd been sleeping for the past few weeks. Fortunately I've been liberal enough in my use of cover names and stories that he never suspected a thing until I had already stabbed the life out of him.

Mala looks back at the lifeless corpse behind her. She slides toward the bottom of the bed and leans over to reach into a leather bag resting on the floor. As she leans, the camera catches a glimpse of a small tattoo of an exceptionally beautiful plant located in the small of Mala's back. The experienced eye can tell that it is, quite fittingly, the lethal foxglove plant. Mala sits back up and pulls a black leather glove onto each of her hands.

The best part is that tomorrow, I'll go back to life as usual, as though nothing happened. That's the great part about staging a murder-suicide. In a secondary ship nearby, I've stored a bound and unconscious prostitute who I intend to implicate, along with a bag I can pass off as hers and such a large quantity of hallucinogenics that any inspector with a brain would blame the drugs for the crime committed. What they'll have a harder time explaining is the untraceable and irreparable malfunction in his cloning system, implemented several hours ago courtesy of yours truly. This guy hasn't had his cloning system changed in the past decade of sitting behind a CONCORD desk, so no one will know whether this malfunction happened today or ten years ago.

My work is still cut out for me. I need to clear this room of any evidence that might implicate me, aside from this recording, of course. It seems fitting to have turned this insidious cloning sabotage technique, a technique he once used, against him. I view this as this is an entirely justified killing, so I'm not overly concerned about psychological repercussions on my end. There's only one foreseeable difficulty I might have as a result of this:

I have to live with the fact that I deliberately chose to come here yet again and have incredible, passionate sex with the bastard who sabotaged and killed both of my parents.