Planetary Exterminatrix Clawed-Fist-of-the-Matriarchs looked up from her terminal blearily after far too much time without a stretch break. With a start she realized she wasn't alone.
A slight-looking alien stared at her across the black metal of her desk. Its void-suit was strangely textured, and she realized it was a snarl of verdant plant growth reaching from the creature's two bootsoles up to its presumed head.
She jumped, and one of her auxiliary limbs went for the holdout laser she kept next to her desk's lamp. Her stalk-eyes widened to take in more of the room.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," it said - remarkably - in her own tongue.
Clawed-Fist froze. "How do you know my language?" she queried.
"I know more about you than I would ever have wished to learn, Exterminatrix," it retorted disdainfully, and a small part of her brain wondered how long it had spent learning how to inflect those words.
"Then you are here for revenge," Clawed-Fist said, playing for time.
"Nothing so small or petty," it replied, the corner of its maw quirking upwards faintly. "It is any species' right to refuse the biome exchange."
"Bah, so you're one of the humans, then," the hulking truekin scoffed.
"We are Life, a braid of threads from its rich tapesty. I am as much the microbes in my gut and on my skin, as I am the mammal that is their vessel. I am the plants and fungus of my suit, and I am so mu-" the human started, the curving wreath of branching horns reaching forth from its brow bobbing as it spoke.
"You're sneering imperialists hiding behind a flimsy morality display," the Exterminatrix interrupted venomously. She did not expect the infiltrator to laugh in return.
"That is rich, Clawed-Fist. How many extirpations have you overseen? How many ecospheres have you shattered on the orders of your superiors? Don't answer me, you arrogant roach, I know exactly how much evil you've wrought.
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Eat the dirt, drink the seas, and salt the globe with nuclear fire. Again, and again, and again. I've seen the lifeless balls of rock your kind leave in their wake.
We had to dig for a kilometre under the surface of the last world to find anything living to share with our grove." The thing's small hand kept patting the pommel of a curved, ornately-wrought blade on its hip as it lectured - and that was unmistakably the tone it was taking - the truekin dictatrix.
The damnfool creature is carrying a ceremonial sabre like a post-industrial cavalry officer who hasn't yet realized her own obsolescence, Clawed-Fist thought, trying perhaps a little too hard to discredit the infiltrator who had evaded or slayed her kheshig guards.
"So no, I'm not here for vengeance. I am here for justice. For the many worlds you will destroy, and for the worlds that you already have," the human said, pacing like a caged predator and regarding her with laser-focus.
"Before I die I have a question, human," the Exterminatrix breathed grudgingly.
"Ask, and maybe I will answer," the human replied, looking unreadable.
"Every civilization we've ever destroyed has its mass graves, its unsavoury secrets. Nobody makes it to space without stepping on someone, or somewhere to get there. Tell me human, how many worlds have your kind killed?" she asked, and finally she had found a chink in the armour. She reveled in having made the smug little thing seem off-balance for a moment. She snatched her gun and fired without really aiming, letting her cybernetics do the heavy lifting for her.
The human twisted, drawing the blade at its hip as Clawed-Fist grabbed her pistol and angling the decorative-looking weapon between the two figures. The beam was directed away from its target by the lattice of superconducting crystals in the human's sword.
An alarm started to blare as the laser punched a hole in the composite of the bulkhead and the gases in her cabin began to leak into an empty part of the ship. The Exterminatrix realized with cold fear that her office's depressurization kit was on the far side of the human.
The human didn't seem so concerned. A glistening wetness had begun to pool above their brow, and then with resiny slowness it ran down the being's face. It met the growth of the human's living suit just above the line of its mandible, and the visor slime hardened into a waxy plate. The faint glow of a bioluminscent HUD escaped the visor's mildly bulbous eye studs.
It pointed the blade at Planetary Exterminatrix Clawed-Fist-of-the-Matriarchs, and a portion of the energy the weapon had prevented from reaching its wielder lanced back in the direction of the truekin tyrant.
Essentially unarmoured, the Exterminatrix did not weather it well. A cylinder of torso-flesh the size of the human's arm vaporized, expanding rapidly and causing Clawed-Fist's upper body to erupt in a spectacular burst of bone shards and gobbets of wet matter.
The human stood and watched the smoking corpse as it slowly slumped over. "Only one," she sighed bitterly, "and that was one too many."