“We have reason to believe that the last expedition had made contact with the aliens and had gained some vital intelligence about them. We know that, but that’s all we know. All other contact with the expedition was lost before we received any of the details.

“Agent X was the only surviving member of that expedition. A rescue team found him on a small craft, orbiting Mendel. He couldn’t even speak and he soon fell into a coma, the state in which he was when you began your treatments. His mind was very diseased.”

“And you need us to dig that information out of his diseased mind,” Louise said.

The General nodded.

“Yes, the loss of our missions now seem to indicate that we are in a state of undeclared war with this species, a cold war if you will. But there are signs of hyper-space disruption in this system, all out of proportion to the limited activities of our spacecraft. We fear that the alien species may be mobilizing. A hot war may follow at any time. Earth may even be a target, as they could have calculated our originating location from the trail of our own spacecrafts’ hyper-space disruptions. If not from that, then perhaps from our electromagnetic signals, whether in hyper-space or normal space. We just don’t know.”

“Thus, the urgency,” Charles said. “Thus, Terminal Lucidity.”

A lone agent is discovered orbiting a newly discovered exoplanet. Though his mind has been badly damaged, it is believed to hold vital secrets about a threatening alien species. But, can the medical staff uncover these secrets in time to prevent an interstellar war? Might one of them be a saboteur, working for the other side? And will their efforts, if successful, mean death for the agent and tragedy for his young daughter?

The story is about 13,000 words, or about 60-90 minutes at typical reading speeds.