If you become a monster to put down a monster you’ve still got a monster running down at the end of the day and have as such not really solved the whole monster problem at all. – RecklessPrudence
Beware the hand of the Enlisted Man, for all he has known is to kill – Galactic Proverb.
They called it the War of the Monsters. Those who survived it. And there weren’t many of those who survived it. Biotechs in that pocket of linked star-systems had long since surrendered on all ideas about behemoths. They’d given up on splicing in admirable animal qualities.
What they’d gone for, instead, was the Psi factor.
It almost destroyed them all.
Alice Tall flinched at their minds before their hands ever opened the door to her survival pod. Ran herself through her Mantra a dozen times before the kind and gentle gloved hands removed her into the bright and alien lights. Already, aspects of her were dipping into their minds. Finding common language and potential exploits.
They gave her clothes. An ill-fitting medical pyjama set, but it was clothing, all the same. The enemy never gave her anything. They could be barely relied upon to give her food and water. These people were not the enemy. They had kind intent and did not recognise her as a combatant.
She had to ask. Lest she fulfil her purpose as a walking bomb. Alice pulled the most common of their words together into a desperate sentence. “Need mind stills,” she frenetically tapped the stipple-mark on her neck where her ally-supplied medication went vis subcutaneous medical spray. “Need mind stills. PLEASE!”
“Depressant? You need a depressant?”
She vigorously nodded. “Mind stills! Yes!” Alice found another word. “Stat.”
The building pressures of the voices within stilled the instant the chemicals entered her system. Alice sighed. These were nice people. She didn’t want to detonate on them.
“Now,” said a suited tech as they withdrew their own, much more streamlined, meds gun. “Why do you need depressants?”
A different one in a suit reacted as if they’d encountered something shocking. “She’s a teep,” they said. “And she’s only five.”
“Five? She looks like a grown woman!”
Alice found their mind. Sharing. A telepathic embrace. Just like she greeted her sisters and brothers in the lab. Because any comfort was worth struggling though the chemical haze for. So many unfamiliar things, in that alien mind. Family. History. Society.
Hungry for more, she reached out for his memories… and found a wall.
“I’m sorry, Alice,” said the alien. “You were going too far. You’d have lost your Self.”
“Why’s that important?” she asked. Loss of self was all she’d been trained to do.
“Because it’s brand new and precious,” said the alien. Ze was called Biil. “That’s something that has to be nurtured. Not killed.”
Then she said the words that made enemies out of her makers for these kind and generous people. “But I’m supposed to be a bomb.”
Sometimes the monsters are not the ones who are made, she would learn at a later date, but the ones who do the making.
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