The ship dropped out of hyperspace, broadcasting a request to land. The computers took a look at the permissions and granted permission. The sleep, small and sleek, quickly entered orbit and dropped down to the planet's surface. It settled at the starport in the berth it was assigned.

None of the crew or the passengers noted that all of the other berths were deserted, empty of ships.

The main hatch cycled, dropping down the boarding ramp, and the pilot walked down with a woman, chatting with her, flirting and somewhat hoping that perhaps she could be convinced to spend some 'quality time' with the pilot.

They both looked forward at the clacking whine of solenoids charging.

Three score Lanaktallan's stood on the tarmac of the landing area, the first rank kneeling down, all of them aiming their weapons.

No neural weapons this time. Plasma and heavy lasers normally used to disable vehicles.

ExeSec wasn't taking any chances.

The pilot swore, grabbing the female and bodily throwing her back up the ramp and slapping a button. The ramp started to whine as it went up and the male pilot's hand darted to his waist, where he pulled out a pistol.

The first plasma round hit him in the chest, lighting his shirt on fire. He staggered back but fired his own pistol three times.

Four ExeSec went down, two with shattered helmets, the third with their chest armor caved inward in the front and dimpled outward in the back, the round passing through his chest and then completely through the abdomen of the one behind him.

More plasma rounds hit, the human going down on one knee, holding his chest with one hand as he kept firing with the other.

Missiles fired from man-pack launchers hit the ship's engines. Two bounced off, the liquified durasteel EFP vanishing into the sky. The third hit and penetrated, damaging the engine when it smashed into the graviton pump.

The ship wasn't armored and the anti-tank weaponry slammed into the hull, blowing craters in the hull. Destroying scanners, communications arrays, particle shield generators, and more.

The ramp was still raising, the human male was still shooting.

The laser hit him in the face, liquefying and then cauterizing flesh.

Across the planet, fascinated beings watched as the human collapsed, finger still pulling the trigger, as a heavy vehicle laser sliced through his chest, exposing his rib cage, and sliced free his arm.

The ship sat there.

Three times ExeSec ignored the pleas from the humans inside to let them go, to allow them to surrender.

The fourth time they agreed.

The female came out, looking nervous. The ramp began going up as she slowly crossed the tarmac toward the three Lanaktallan ExeSec officers. She reached them and began to speak.

The leader lifted up a plasma pistol designed to shoot through durasteel, put it against her forehead, and pulled the trigger.

The human woman dropped dead on the tarmac.

The ship sat silent.

After nearly an entire day a team of ExeSec Special Operations Soldiers moved up on the ship and managed to get the door open. The twelve highly experienced commandos entered the ship.

At first nothing happened.

Then the screams began. Human screams of rage and loss.

Lanaktallan screams of agony.

A human female, with her head pelt done in braids with little pink ribbons at the end, walked out of the ship. She was escorted by two males, their hair cut close, both of them holding ExeSec close combat shields to protect the female.

She lifted a severed Lanaktallan head over her own, screamed a scream of pure rage that sent three nearby ExeSec waiting to ambush her down on their knees, blood gushing from their ears and eyes.

The human female threw the severed head onto the tarmac.

The ramp whined back up.

The ship sat there.

The sun was low in the sky when the Third Most High shouted through a loudspeaker for the humans to come out and surrender. That they would be returned to the Confederacy and granted non-combatant status.

The fact he was standing in the dried blood of the larger human female that he had shot in the face never really dawned on him.

Still, the ramp lowered.

The humans that came out were smaller ones, like the human female in the lead who had thrown the severed head. Their faces strange to those watching. It wasn't that they wanted to watch, but all four channels were only showing the "Showdown at the Starport" live on a constant feed.

Their faces had streaks of blood under the eyes or across the eyes or along the cheekbones. Bloody handprints on their faces. Some had nicked and scraped scalps from where their hair had been cut. They were wearing uniforms, all of them matching. Many of them had badges and patches on sashes to show how important they were.

Some had been crying.

They were within five paces of the Most High when the female with the braided hair and the pink bows yelled one word.

Weapons taken from the ExeSec commando force were pulled out of hiding.

The little Terrans started shooting. Others charged forward with knives, prybars, chunks of metal honed into blades.

Six were killed.

With weapons normally used to stop vehicles.

The rest made it into the starport concourse. Eager cameras swooped after the Terrans. The news annotators talked rapidly about Terran infantry tactics, their discipline, their long practice obvious in the way they would move.

That's not how it went.

The little Terrans swarmed the place. Any Lanaktallan they came across they attacked. The bigger males would tackle the Lanaktallan, getting them on the ground, the smaller females would fall upon them with knives.

Two reporters were killed by female Terrans screaming in rage and savagely hacking with long knives fashioned from broken crysteel shards.

The cameras followed them.

Not content with reducing the concourse to a slaughterhouse, the humans, most of them no bigger than a Telkan or Tnvaru, scampered out into the street. They attacked beings in cars, taxis, and trucks.

Forty Terrans had left the spaceship. Thirty-four survived to reach the concourse. Thirty attacked the parkinglot. Ten of those ran down the street with guns, firing wildly at any movement they saw. Blowing up cars, shooting in windows, running into buildings and killing.

The other twenty boarded the two maglev trains.

It took nearly all night to bring down the last Terran.

It was the Terran female with the braids and the pink bows.

The camera, the reporter it had been linked to dead a few paces away, lingered over her body, panning over it so that the beings viewing at home could see her.

On her back was words, Terran letters and numbers, blocky and fierce.

The Tri-Vid translated it automatically and Lanaktallans elite and Executors breathed a sigh of relief they had managed to stop such a skilled paramilitary force. Obviously special operations troops.

The other Lanaktallan who worked in factories or mines, the Near-Civilized and the Neo-Sapients, looked at one another in their family rooms, then at the screen. None of the Terrans had looked like commandos to them.

Where the words had been translated.

GALAXY SCOUT TROOP 34813

NEW BHOPAL - TERRASOL

WE ARE A LIGHT FOR A BETTER GALAXY

----------------

The infants were mostly sleeping. Here and there one was awake, usually feeding, or having its swaddling changed, or just looking at the holographic stimulation projected just above their crib that only they could see.

Nurses moved around carefully. No robotic nurses here.

The camera in the corner of the room slowly panned the infants, looking over them. Little pink human infants, little brown human infants, even some of other colors. Some even with fur.

The camera zoomed in on a newborn, only hours outside of her mother. She was little and brown, with unfocused brown eyes, and a thatch of black hair on her head. She was waving around her little fists and kicking, wearing a light pink diaper to signify she was a female.

The camera, normally controlled by the security eVI, was being operated by something else.

The Head of Hospital Security, Vonash-33842, sat in his virtual office and watched his visitor, who kept panning the camera over the tiny infant humans, zooming in on them. Using the parabolic microphones to listen to their tiny noises.

His visitor was made up of a trillion lines of code, all constantly mutating and shifting.

Vonash knew it was rare, almost unheard of, for his visitor to be seen outside of where it normally existed.

There was a light knock on his 'door' and he checked it.

Another one. This one small, furry, like a bipedal fox.

Vonash opened the 'door' and the newcomer came in.

"Can you give us some privacy?" the newcomer asked.

Vonash nodded and left, going to check on the rest of the security for the hospital. There were hashes to hash and monitors to monitors and firewalls to wall.

"Telkan," the human made of code said, nodding, moving the camera to look at where the nurses where wheeling in a small pink human boy. He was sucking on a bottle, his eyes drowsy, his feet wrinkly as his hands, still looking vaguely wet.

"Welcome, little one. I see you," the human said.

"Everyone's looking for you," the Telkan said.

"I'm right here," the human said. "Look at him. He's beautiful. They're all beautiful."

"Mantid is practically beside herself. She's alternating between raving at what happened and telling all of us to be calm to wringing her hands about where you are," the Telkan said.

"She worries," the human answered. He panned the camera over to where a little one had pulled her foot up to chew on it.

"They were able to recover all of them via their SUDS. Turns out they left before war was declared and had just arrived. They had no idea we were at war," Telkan said, watching as the infant suddenly started to cry because someone was chewing on her foot. She realized they stopped and looked around, then started chewing on her own foot again, starting the cycle over.

"I know," the human answered.

"How often do you come here?" Telkan asked.

The human shrugged. "When I need to think. When I need to weigh something I usually come somewhere like here. I spend a lot of time in places like this."

"Why?" Telkan asked. "Of all places, why here, TerraSol?"

"Do you know what has killed more of my people than any other thing in all of our history?" TerraSol asked, staring at a small sleeping baby that was covered with light downy ocher hair.

"Old age?" Telkan guessed.

TerraSol laughed. "No. War. Before the Mantid glassed us we still lost hundreds of millions a century," TerraSol turned and looked at Telkan. "It wasn't supposed to be like this when we left Earth. We were supposed to leave behind war, not accelerate it. More of my people have been killed in wars since the after the end of the Mantid War and after the Fall of the Imperium of Rage than ever existed before the Diaspora. We've lost trillions to war."

"That's a lot," Telkan said softly.

"The leading cause is, of course, Death by Misadventure, which is a fancy way of saying 'stupid shit', because we're... well... we're human," TerraSol said.

"They're cute. Like bald podlings," Telkan said. "You care about them all, don't you?"

TerraSol nodded.

"You're different than we are, aren't you?" Telkan asked.

"Yeah. More emotional filters than you guys have. You need to know how your race feels at any given time," TerraSol said. "You need to know how the different groups, different regions, feel emotionally about a given topic or at any given time."

Telkan frowned. "Don't you?"

TerraSol shook his head. "No. Not to the extent all of you do. Not any more. I know what they feel. What I feel. It's in everything. We can't help it, we can't purge it from our souls. Even at our happiest its back there, simmering, growling."

"Rage," Telkan said. TerraSol nodded. "We saw it. On the battlefield. First to save us from the PreCursors, then to help us save ourselves from the Dweller."

TerraSol nodded.

"Is it from the Glassing?" Telkan asked.

There was silence for a moment, the swirling code that made up TerraSol slowed and almost stopped. Right before Telkan asked again TerraSol answered.

"No. It's always been there."

Telkan moved up close.

"Me too."

-------------

>TELKAN HAS ENTERED THE CHAT

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Did you find him?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

Yeah. He just needed a few moments after the statements from those Galaxy Scouts were broadcast on the net.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

CYBERNETIC ORGANISM CONSENSUS

Where was he?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

Watching warsteel rivets being forged on Mercury.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TREANA'AD HIVE WORLDS

Is he all right?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

He's doing all right.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

MANTID FREE WORLDS

Are you all right?

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---

TELKAN FORGE WORLDS

I think so.

---NOTHING FOLLOWS---