---Kill---
---Tymancha’s perspective---
Mr Taylor stands in front of us, dressed in his skin tight uniform, his back straight, his bearded face stern and serious and with his long, wavy red hair bound into a tight bun at the back of his head.
Beside him, atop a 1.5m pedestal, rests a frighteningly enormous skull!
The thick horns somewhat resemble those of a steppe bison.
The lower face (its nostrils pointing forward at the top of a blunt snout) is more feline looking but with a little bit of gorilla mixed in.
The arrangement of eyes on the upper face is far more arachnoid than the (relatively) more humanoid arrangement on the Vrakhand, the auxiliary eyes much larger (both absolutely as well as relative to the much larger main eyes) and less unidirectional.
“Thank you for comin’ everyone…” he begins, coolly “…At around midday yesterday, the nearby Twigg village known as Dith was attacked by what, at first, we were misled into thinkin’ was a Vrakhand. Thankfully, that misunderstandin’ was cleared up without a war breaking out about it! The true culprit has been positively identified as one of these…” he indicates the skull “…Known as ‘khorhaszh’, or ‘cursed ones’ by the Vrakhand, who have an entire Tower of Babelesque legend about ’em and who agreed to lend us this skull from their royal trophy collection, and ‘mwit tner lok’, or ‘monsters that aren’t people’ by the Twigg (please forgive my pronunciation… languages’ve never been a specialty). This animal is believed by Dr Lamark and Sknz’h to be an evolution’ry cousin to the Vrakhand… Now, we ain’t here as folklorists, theologists, anatomists or geneticists, so we can leave worryin’ about the legends and the biology to our specialists in those areas(!)… What we’re here to do is find this thing… and kill it!”
“What?!” comes an outraged voice.
Mr Kelly stands from his chair among the dozen or so, arranged directly in front of the stage, looking furious.
“I said we’re gonna hunt this thing down and kill it, Steve.” says Mr Taylor, his green eyes fixed on the much smaller man.
“Like fuck we are!” declares the New Australian, stepping up onto the stage and closing about 35cm of the 60cm height difference by putting himself on level ground with the man he’s challenging.
Taylor takes a deep breath and starts “Steve, I understand that your religion…”
“This’s got nothing to do with me bein’ an Irwinist!” asserts the khaki clad man “That thing sounds like it could very likely be one of if not the last of its kind! You want us to kill it just for doin’ what animals do?! Just for doin’ what it needs to to live!?”
“No, Steve…” asserts Taylor, stonily “…I think we need to kill it ’cause it’s already showed itself to not have any fear of at least the Twigg… I’m an animal lover as well, Steve! I’ve never even eaten meat that didn’t come out of a lab… ’cept in survival situations! But my job and the job of most of the people here…” he gestures to the seats “…isn’t worryin’ about animals’ safety… it’s to worry about people’s safety! That thing killed and ate at least seven Twigg yesterday! Twenty more’re injured and nine unaccounted for, likely also dead!!! What do you want us to do? Nothing?!”
“Relocation!” shouts the blue eyed man “Tag it, bag it, move it back to those mountains where the Queen says she got this one! That’s the humane thing to do!”
“It’s already proved it won’t stay there (if that’s even where it came from) though, ain’t it!?… What if, next time it comes down, it don’t come here? What if it does and we ain’t here to stop it?!… You’re happy to have those deaths on your conscience?” asks the redhead.
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“About as happy as I’d be to help make a species extinct(!)”
“If this one really is the last, they’d need to be cloned back in any event! Wouldn’t it be better to have ’em not be around for the moment and then they could be reintroduced when the local tech’s advanced enough that they ain’t a problem anymore?”
Disgustedly, Kelly observes “Typical fuckin’ Earth attitude!”
Confused, Taylor asks “Fuck’s that s’posed to mean?!”
“Means you don’t take any personal responsibility as a steward of the natural world!!!… You grew up surrounded by dodos, mammoths, aurochs, Tasmanian tigers, giant sloths and woolly rhinos and so, you think ‘Yeah… don’t need to worry… If it’s a problem, the government’ll fix it! Just so long as they can find some DNA, they can bring anything back!’”
“I mean… can’t they though?!… Like, I take you’re point; ‘A kingdom that's once been destroyed can never come again into bein’, nor can the dead ever be brought back to life’ an’ all that but, from the sounds of it, the kingdom’s already mostly destroyed! These things’ve obviously been a massive liability to Twigg and Vrakhand for so long that they forced ’em to push ’em to the edge of extinction! If the last Roman was runnin’ around stabbin’ people and the only way to stop him was to kill him, I’d definitely do it(!)”
“People who ain’t had a choice about whether to rely on nature to live before don’t have that attitude! We know that every animal is necessary to its ecosystem! We don’t think ‘Ah, just get rid of it, it’s inconvenient!’”
Cocking an eyebrow, Taylor answers “So, I s’pose, if an animal like this attacked your camp when you was ‘relyin’ on nature to live’, you’d’ve gone ‘Oh well, circle of life!’ as it tore your loved ones apart, would you(?)”
“Course not! We’d not’ve been attacked in the first place!”
Taylor’s second eyebrow joins his first, halfway up his forehead, as he furiously asks “Oh! So it’s the Twigg’s fault!? They weren’t careful enough?! That what you sayin’ you pretentious twat!?!?!?”
“OBVIOUSLY not you sanctimonious Pommie wanker!” snarls back the New Australian, not sounding at all like he meant ‘[wanker]’ in any way but as an insult on this occasion “I’m sayin’…!”
“Gentlemen!” interrupts Twila’s voice, disembodied as her [droid] is not here “I can see tempers are flaring… Why don’t we all take a step back, a deep breath and count to ten before the ambient testosterone reaches hazardous levels in here, hmmm(?) We’re all friends, right!”
Taylor turns his eyes down and does indeed take a deep breath “Yeah… Twila’s right… I’m sorry for gettin’ upset with you, Steve…”
Kelly’s face softens as he chuckles “Yeah… same here, you wanker(!)” making the word sound much friendlier this time.
“We do still need to figure this out, though… I ain’t happy with a catch an’ release and you ain’t happy with a hunt an’ kill… I… guess the only option is a catch and detain?… Even if I ain’t happy with the prospect of bringing an unfriendly, 1.5 tonne, bulletproof hypercarnivore anywhere near folk on the compound or ship… where they’d definitely die if it got loose for whatever reason…”
“We could throw it in stasis? Gas it in its lair, airlift it back here, throw it in a pod (build a second layer of containment around it in case the stasis field drops out), then, when we leave, move it to one of the cells on the ship and hand it off to conservationists when we get somewhere where that’s feasible?” suggests Kelly.
Taylor sighs “Sure… but I’m warning you now, if that thing comes at us, I ain’t gonna hesitate.”
Kelly nods “Fair dinkum, mate…” and goes to retake his seat.
Taylor turns back to the rest of us and says “Right. Now that’s sorted, I’ll move on to explainin’ the rest: We have been invited into Dith village to begin trackin’. We are the first ever nonTwigg known to’ve been given the honour but, bear in mind, we ain’t gonna be seein’ it at its best… From what I hear, the place looks like a bombsite right now! Though, Jae’s told me to warn you that the Twigg take almost as dim a view of those that break things as they do of those that hoard things, so everyone is gonna watch where their feet go and not lean on anything while we’re there! We don’t want to sour their gratitude by accidentally knocking down one of their houses!… Samus…” he points to the large blonde woman whose face twists into a grimace “…’counta your arachnophobia, you’re stayin’ here.”
“Oh thank fuck!” she sighs, relieved.
“If we go dark, then you’re assumin’ this thing is too dangerous to take and focusin’ on beefin’ up countermeasures here until the ship’s back in action… you are not comin’ to ‘avenge’ us, you're not throwin' your fist to the heavens an' shoutin' 'It shoulda been me!'(!) Once you get back to Citadel you are makin’ clear to all future missions just what a threat these things are!”
“No complaints here(!)” she answers.
“Everyone else is comin’ along just for the extra numbers… Tymancha…” he points to me “…you got the most important job!”