The Minister speaks with Gregory, head of the Acolyte warrior division, who favors an immediate invasion. The Minister challenges him, suggesting that his mild disagreement with the Gua’s cautious strategy is treason.

"Do you question the ability of the current Guahead to successfully defeat a human army?" the Minister asks.

"Yes," Joshua replies.

The Minister explains his plan: he is going to carefully evaluate the agents of each division. He’ll root out the human sympathizers, and Joshua will kill them.

Trent, the head of the Empiricists – the scientific division of the invasion force – outlines the progress of his research for Joshua and the Minister. He’s learned that sexual desire is the most important and effective tool in influencing human behavior.

Trent believes that humanity’s many flaws – sex, personal aggrandizement and addiction chief among them – are likely to cause the species to collapse of its own accord. The Gua are in an excellent position to help humans with their own destruction.

The Minister is not impressed – such a conclusion is very different from the one he would draw from his own analysis of the Gua's experimental data. He reads from Trent’s early case files, in which he speaks of selfless behavior in humans that may make them difficult to conquer.

Trent claims that later testing proved that these early conclusions were unreliable. The Minister doesn’t believe him, and angrily demands to know his true agenda.

Joshua calms him down, and they leave the Empiricist to continue their evaluations.

Alicia, the head of the Osmosis division, outlines their efforts to infiltrate human institutions. She explains – with the visual assistance of two naked models -- that their best results come from creating sexually irresistible husks and seducing humans.

The Minister is pleased with her work, but draws her aside and questions her about incidents in which Gua agents have themselves been seduced by human sexuality. Alicia admits to the problem but claims that it only affects a small proportion of agents.

The problem, she says, is that human sex is so pleasurable. She then offers to arrange a personal demonstration for the Minister later, so that he can better understand the problem.

The Minister accepts, and moves on. Returning to his quarters, he tells Joshua he’ll have a preliminary list of undesirables to be executed in the morning.

Later, Joshua talks to Trent. The Empiricist is scared – as are many of the others – and thinks the Minister’s purge has more to do with dissension back home than the situation on Earth.

Joshua is sympathetic, but warns Trent to be careful about what he says – "not everyone’s an old friend."

"I never realized how hard this mission would be," Trent says. "We never realized what it would be like to be in human form."

Joshua asks him why the tone of his reports changed over the years, and Trent explains that while he liked humans at first, their attractions soon wore thin. "They deserve to be conquered," he says.

That night, a Gua female introduces the Minister to the thrill of a sheer camisole. His guards listen in, paying no attention to the man sneaking up behind them with a knife.

He kills them, enters the Minister’s quarters, and kills the Gua. He’s about to kill the Minister when Joshua – alerted while he was monitoring the security systems – bursts into the room.

Joshua fires several shots at the assassin, who dodges the bullets. Then the assassin dives into a tiny air vent and vanishes.

The next morning, Joshua reports that the complex is sealed. Unfortunately, the traitor – who has used one of the enhanced husks in Alicia’s lab – could be a Gua from any of the three divisions.

The Minister tells him to get on with the investigation, but Joshua has a few questions. The Minister is unhelpful, though, and claims that he was alone when the assassin attacked.

Joshua begins his investigation with Alicia, establishing that someone broke into the lab. The assassin is highly skilled, able to download himself or herself into the enhanced husk, then return to his or her own body and hide the husk without leaving clues in the computer system.

On the other hand, the missing enhanced husk may be a useful clue if it is found – it lacks the usual Gua self-destruct mechanism, and its patterns imposed on its brain by the download can prove who was using it.

Joshua questions her further, and she admits that she sent one of her underlings to Minister the previous night. Joshua thinks there’s more she’s not telling him, but Alicia refuses to say anything else, warning him to stay out of the Minister’s private business.

In his office, Joshua examines a metal trace he found in the door to the lab. It matches the composition of an Acolyte knife.

He finds Gregory, who has learned nothing useful from his subordinates. As is traditional for murder mysteries, the Acolyte leader was in his room the previous night, and has no alibi.

He’s angry that his own agent is questioning his integrity, but Joshua is determined to find the assassin no matter who it may be. Gregory is suspicious, however, that Joshua is using the Minister’s assignment to gain personal power.

Gregory is also suspicious that Joshua’s friend Trent is the real culprit, and recommends that Joshua focus his efforts there.

Trent is uneasy when Joshua comes to question him, though the Acolyte tries to reassure him that this is an inquiry, not an investigation. Trent doesn’t think there was a murder attempt, though – he thinks the Minister arranged the "attack" as an excuse for carrying out the purge.

Trent is fed up with his species’ hypocrisy – he considers the current Guahead a butcher, and the invasion a waste of resources that could be used to save the Gua’s dying home planet.

After he leaves Trent, Joshua spots a suspicious bulge in the garden. It’s the body of the enhanced husk, and it has a bracelet Alicia was wearing in its hand.

Joshua shows the bracelet of Alicia. She claims it was taken from her lab.

"You’ll have to do better than that," he tells her. She does, telling Joshua that she doesn’t fear the Minister – she has recorded enough illicit sexual encounters among the Gua’s visiting leaders that she can easily protect himself from him.

"Why would I kill him, Joshua?" she asks. "I already have all the power."

Joshua reports his lack of progress to the Minister, who recommends torturing people to extract confessions. "We have no time," he tells the Acolyte.

The Minister also has news from home – a group of rebels have been captured, and one of them gave up Trent’s name as a human sympathizer. Trent is accused of only pretending to perform experiments on human children.

The Minister wants to make an example out of Trent, but Joshua insists that he be given a fair trial in the Forum, as is his right as a Gua.

"I’ve had enough of this!" the Minister says. "It’s time to smoke out the traitors. Kill Trent."

Joshua confronts Trent about his falsification of the experimental data. He admits it, saying that the experiments had no military or scientific value.

Trent defends himself with the words of Medek, a philosopher that Joshua and Trent studied in their youth. Medek argued that duty to those above must be tempered by one’s own moral values, and Trent believes that when the philosopher’s work was banned it was the beginning of the end for the Gua.

Trent still denies killing the Minister. He has learned something from his subordinates, though – there may be a cabal of Acolytes dedicated to the immediate destruction of humanity, and they are running their operations out of the wine cellar.

Joshua breaks into the wine cellar. He finds weapons, a laptop, photographs of dead humans, and a knife with Gregory’s fingerprints.

He goes to Gregory, accusing him of being part of the cabal. Gregory claims his knife was stolen, and refuses to surrender to Joshua.

"It sickens me that you’d lower yourself to carrying out his assassinations," he says.

Joshua shoots him, and he dissolves.

The executions begin. "The price of disobedience must be death," the Minister rants, crediting Joshua with exposing the "dangerous rebellion" of Gregory and his followers.

"Many other enemies of the Gua will be named shortly," he promises. He orders the Gua to report any sedition to Joshua’s intelligence unit.

Later, Joshua reviews the evidence, and remembers that Alicia said she records visiting leaders’ sexual encounters.

He sneaks into her lab and finds a set of digital videodisks in a locked drawer. He plays the recording of the Minister, watching closely as the assassin raises his knife and intones, "For Medek."

He goes to Trent. "I should have guessed you’d figure it out," the Empiricist says.

Joshua is angry that his old friend has lied to him, but Trent explains that he had to protect the others – a group of Gua who can no longer stand by and watch the travesty of the invasion continue.

"You’re a traitor," Joshua says.

"Far from it," says Trent. "We’re fighting for the very survival of our species."

He reminds Joshua of a boyhood debate they once had: would he risk everything and break any rule to rid the world of an evil force?

"I remember your answer as a youth," Trent says. "Have you changed that much with time?"

Joshua goes to the Minister’s quarters and wakes him with a knife to his throat. He demands to know why the Minister didn’t tell him what the assassin says.

The Minister tells Joshua he didn’t want to feed the flames of rebellion by bringing up the name of a banned philosopher. He also warns Joshua not to kill him, telling the Acolyte that he’d be caught and punished with loss of his life, his friends’ lives, and his reputation.

"Leave me be," the Minister says, "and I’ll pardon you. I’ll reward you, I’ll make you the leader of our forces on Earth."

Joshua thinks about it.

The next morning, Joshua pronounces sentence on a gagged and struggling Trent. "Take him away and shoot him," he says.

The Minister then announces that he will return to the Gua home planet, and leaves command of the invasion in Joshua’s hands.

Appearances can be deceiving, however. As "the Minister" leaves, a brief conversation with Joshua reveals that he is actually Trent, who has downloaded himself into the Minister’s body.

The Minister was executed in Trent’s body. Trent will return to the homeworld as the Minister and work against the invasion.

"Good luck," Joshua tells him.