A popular captain of a military space ship has a teleporter ‘accident.’ The teleporter turns him into a sergal-taur thing, but doesn’t send him to his destination (a colony, just for a standard check-in). He wakes up in the medical ward with the doctors (and engineers) not knowing how to change him back to human, and the saboteur that arranged that ‘accident’ in an adjacent bed, having failed to properly kill herself.
The captain (Ryan Weston) has to fight hard to keep his rank and assignment, as not everybody is convinced he’s the same person. He’s knocked a bit down to size, as he used to have an ego that crowds him out of the elevator.
He becomes more or less a sergal-taur, with gray and black fur with red highlights, a null crotch, and really bad eyesight. In order to keep him from using the teleporter to change back, his body is full of introduced teleporter errors. Which is not good for his health.
People are turned non-human by the transporter every so often, but usually deliberately. The setting is similar to Star Trek with no (sapient) aliens, and no FTL communications. Having no way to tell people that you're arriving before you get there has interesting consequences that is not explored whatsoever in this story.