Nataw smiled at him, “I wasn’t worried. I knew you’d be by eventually. It isn’t all about winning or losing. There are some things you only learn by mistake. Besides, even if they held me captive for a thousand years, what of it? What’s a thousand years? It isn’t even as if they had all of me. All I have to do is discorporate and embody myself again in this universe.
“I’m fine.”
Lee raised an eyebrow, “You’re fine? You can discorporate in the middle of that?”
Nataw frowned and looked down at the silver and black disc, “You know, now that you mention it, I can’t. I hadn’t gotten bored enough to try, but now that I am… Hmm. They’ve got me. You know, for young species, they’re quite bright. I think it's just the right kind of adaptable. They’ve found so many of Destroy’s traps and gotten around them. I mean, not all of their traps. They absorbed a number when they were too inexperienced to realize it and I don’t think they even know it.”
Lee nodded, “It wouldn’t surprise me. They’re a little too internally competitive for a normal species. Those kinds of species flame out after a while. Remember the Tsaatz? I think they ended up eating each other by the time they were done. Destroy’s traps only needed to give them a nudge.”
His smile widening, Nataw said, “Isn’t it interesting? One species needs a nudge to destroy itself. Another takes many and still hasn’t fallen thousands of years later. And which one would you say was better, more kind, more promising?”
Lee sighed, “I don’t know. They were both on the edge. No, you know. The Tsaatz weren’t as bad. I thought they were maybe a few thousand years away from sorting themselves out, but then they discovered a cache of Destroy’s ‘gifts’ and it all fell apart.”
“I thought so too! The Abominators are broken but broken in the right way. Their internal competitiveness was balanced out by an ability to see the big picture. It looks as though they’re about to go too far and then they self-correct. It won’t last forever, but it’s fascinating. I don’t know how their story will end and I want to.”
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Nataw’s voice trailed off at the end as he glanced around the room at the many bodies Lee had left on the floor. The dark fluid leaking from their wounds pooled next to them.
With a shrug, Lee said, “I’d say it ends when they come to our attention. Destroy probably loves them and might help them keep their insanity under control long enough to spread their contagion, but if they ever cause problems, Destroy will throw them out with the trash. They’re a means to an end.”
“True enough,” Nataw stopped examining the bodies with his eyes and looked up, “but I don’t think it’s that simple. I think these creatures are the seeds of Destroy’s destruction. I don’t think you can invest so much in ending life without risk—which reminds me, what are you doing with the humans?”
Shackled by human senses, Lee wondered how long he had. He could use his full self, but he’d be taking a risk, “Don’t you think I ought to get you out?”
He stepped over to the control panel next to the black and silver disc. He’d figure it out. The crevices and buttons inside them showed that the devices had been designed to make it hard for anyone but Abominators or other shapeshifters to use them.
Lee changed and a gray, five-armed form stood in his place. He was an Abominator of the line of some Abominator he’d never heard about, but he’d know if he was asked.
He always had been. If the recording devices in the room checked what happened in the past, they’d show an Abominator entering and killing the others.
Nataw walked to the edge of the disc, touching the translucent substance that kept him contained, “I suppose, but you’re doing something with the humans.”
Three of Lee’s hands molded themselves to access the disc’s controls. Lee said, “The obvious. We all had visions of the future. Mine included them on my side fighting and destroying our people. I thought I’d thought I'd be able to avoid it by siding with Destroy, but nothing changed. The future remained the same and even got worse.”
“You’re doing more than that,” Nataw said. “Your presence here changes them. The device’s presence changes them. It changes the ones you spend the most time with more.”
A shapeshifter now, Lee grew new eyes and a mouth to keep up the conversation as he worked the controls, “It does, but the Abominators you’re so impressed by are copying parts of you, converting it to work within the human genetic system and using it to power their experiments with the species. That’s how I figured out that you were here.”