[Galactic Collegium - Sigtarius VII, 3791]
"When humans break, they tend to break worse than any other species." Professor Xarn said to his class, which contained several humans among the two hundred in the lecture hall. "Does anyone know what I mean by this? No one is asking the humans."
Several people who had turned to their human friends turned back to face the front. The Professor looked around and then continued speaking when no hands other than human hands were in the air. "Human criminals are the worst, and I don't mean those who commit petty crimes. I mean the truly bad men. Murderers, Terrorists, and the like. When a human reaches this point, they tend to go farther than any other race would."
The humans in the room were nodding along, simply taking notes on the lecture, but the rest of the class seemed shocked. A female Dagnion raised her clawed appendage. Professor Xarn pointed to her, and she spoke. "If that is the case, why are we learning about them in an ethics class? They can not be ethical if they go that far."
"An excellent question. Maybe this is where our human friends can provide an answer that still bewilders me to this day." The Professor said, looking from one human to another.
One of the humans, a young man who seemed a little rougher than the others, raised his hand. The Professor saw, "Ah, yes, Arthur, what is your suggestion?"
"There are rules in prison," Arthur said, and many of the non-humans laughed.
The earlier Dagnion chuckled as she spoke, "Of course, there are rules in prison; that is kind of the point."
"No," Arthur said, looking from one person to another as he spoke, "out here in the real world, you can say and do what you want so long as you don't break the laws. But if you put a bunch of people who have no care for laws together, what rules do they follow?"
The Professor smiled as a thoughtful silence fell over the class, he looked at Arthur, "Please explain what you think some of these rules are Arthur."
"Don't Rat. You never harm a pregnant woman or a child, and if you're talkin' shit, you better be able to back it up. Keep respect in your voice, especially for the shot callers, and if you want to get out alive, nothing is any of your business." Arthur said, his tone dead serious.
"How could you possibly know what the rules are?" Asked a young Greyling man. "I mean, unless you were a...."
His voice faded, and everyone looked at Arthur, who burst out laughing, "No, I have not been to prison, but I did respond to the Claxon event three years ago while I was in the corp."
"So you're a veteran?" The Dagnion girl asked.
"Yes, Ma'am, Second Battalion Fifth Regiment of the Rapid Galactic Response Army." Arthur said, "And I can tell you one thing, as rough and tumble as many of the men I served with are, the boys who did what they did on Claxon IV were some of the worst of the worst, and they were some hard motherfuckers."
"What is the Claxon Event?" Asked the Greyling.
The Professor looked at Arthur who shrugged, "I guess I can tell you, we were the response unit and ended up getting tasked withe the investigation. It was roughly..."
[Arvorn City - Claxon IV, 3788]
The chill night air of planet Claxon, specifically Claxon IV, held a note of apprehension and an eerie, unnatural silence. Fifteen minuets earlier, a spaceship of unknown origin had jumped into orbit of the planer and descended to hover roughly a mile above the city of Arvorn.
The Mayor of Arvorn, a native Kishtallon man named Tersh Kipplit, looked up in worry and spoke into a comms device, "I don't know what it is or who it belongs to. That is why I am calling you, I was told that all matters of planetary security in my sector of the planet go through you. No. No. I don't care if your systems say there is no ship; I am telling you that I am looking straight at it."
A few moment's passed, "Look, I already have enough going on, we are hosting that human prison transport ship that needed repairs so I have a warehouse filled to the brim with some of the most violent barbarian pirates you have ever seen, I don't need this. Get a defense ship out here, Now!"
Tersh closed the comms channel and turned to his wife, who looking scared as she cradled their daughter. "Noxa, take Ul'Lana and go to the public shelter, I am going to sound the alarm and then come join you."
They embraced, toughing their whiskers together and then each of them took off to their task. Tersh was sprinting through the streets in an attempt to reach the nearest public safety office and have them initiate the evacuation when he heard a sound unlike anything he had ever heard before. The long drawn out notes held an almost surreal moment of time before weapons batteries on the strange ship opened up on two ships sent to investigate it.
At the same time, doors on the underside of the ship opened up, and drop pods descended to slam into roads, buildings, and anything else in their path. From these pods poured forth strange bipedal spiderlike beings. As Tersh watched, anyone caught in the path of the creatures was killed, and he stopped running. Access the emergency channel to contact the planetary defense forces.
"It's Tersh again, that ship destroyed your investigation ships and is now dropping pods filled with strange creatures that are killing my people. I am activating the overrides on the evac systems. Authentication Tersh Yigvorn Kipplit." As he said this automated systems confirmed his voice print and mere moments later alarm horns blared to life and people began fleeing their homes, and screams began to permeate the silence.
Tersh had done what he needed, and now he had only two concerns. "Noxa, Ul'Lana, I am coming."
With a flex of muscles, his lower leg shifted foot joint down, and internal bone structures locked together, giving him almost an additional foot of height as his foot structure shifted from digitigrade to unguligrade. Tersh took a deep breath and leaned into his run, rapidly accelerating to his max speed of nearly forty-five miles an hour. He was terrified to see others trying to flee using the same trick, only to be run down by the strange creatures. So he did the only thing he could, lowered his head and ran as fast as he could to get to his wife and daughter.
After what felt like an eternity and watching hundreds of his people killed, all while dodging claws and taking a few gashes on his thighs and arms, Tersh finally made it to the shelter he knew Noxa would go to, as it was the one closest to her parents home. He was ushered inside and found his people huddling at the front of the shelter, and in the back were the human guards who had escorted the prisoners who were offloaded from the ship being repaired.
Tersh was angry, as he had only gotten in due to his position and the hopes that he would be able to fix whatever was causing the backup; there were many of his people outside. He marched over to the guard captain. "What the hell are you doing here?!"
"We heard the shots from the ship, so we moved to the shelter." He said, shrugging.
"You are meant to be in your area; why are the prisoners here?" Tersh demanded, unable to process what was going on.
The guard captain shrugged, "this was the closest shelter."
"Why did you not stay in the area we appointed you! This is a civilian shelter!"
The guard captain tapped a bracelet and then gestured to the similar-looking compliance collars that the prisoners wore. "I wasn't going to hide in that warehouse and pray that I got overlooked, and I am not able to move more than a certain distance from all of the prisoners, or I will die as will the prisoners. So I brought them here."
Tersh was about to start yelling at the man when a scream went up outside, the creatures had found them and were starting to tear into the back lines of people. Tersh turned and used his comms to speak through the PA systems. "Women and children, to the back. Men, Kar'ok Na Urn'dala."
The phrase was one passed down through their people since times of antiquity, in modern times it had no equivalent, but roughly translated it meant 'Death comes only to be denied by the strength of the tribe.' With no argument, the women and children rushed to the back, almost pressing into the lines of prisoners and the men rushed forward, claws that had been used for hunting and impressing mates earlier in their evolution put to deadly effect.
At the front of the line, Tersh stood, his hand working a deadly dance; any creature that came too close found its throat missing. To see hundreds of Kishtallon men fighting to protect their families brought a sense of pride and primal joy to his heart, but he knew it would not be enough. He stepped back and rushed to the guards.
"You must fight with us," Tersh said, expecting the guard captain to understand that they must work together to survive this.
"That is not my job." The guard captain said.
In a flash, a primal anger unlike any that Tersh had ever known welled up in his stomach, and with a primeval growl, he ripped the guard captain's throat out. He pulled the compliance control off of the captain's wrist and deactivated the collars.
In an odd moment of silence, he spoke to the three thousand men who had been controlled and forced to take up so much space. "I do not know your crimes, and I do not know any of you. But I know that if you want to survive, you need to fight. Some of you might be thinking that you can hide here with the women and children; just know that if you do not fight, we all die. And if I survive, I will find that you hid, or worse. I will kill you myself. If you fight, I will do what I can to try to get your freedom."
He turned and moved to the door of the shelter to fight once more and many of the mothers kissed their children, and turned to join him, even many of the older children moved to join him. There was a three year old child who was holding a newborn baby. Both began to cry, as they watched their mother walk towards the door.
Suddenly the largest human Tersh had ever seen walked forward, and placed a hand on the head of the crying child, the mother bristled stepping forward, then the human spoke in a thick accent, and broken common.
"You should not be of the crying, little one." The gargantuan man scooped up both children, smiling at them, and stepped forward to the mother and placed them in her arms, "You mothers, stay. Be mothers, I fight. What man hides with women."
With that, every single prisoner walked to the door. As they all passed they nodded to Tersh, finally the large man looked down at Tersh.
"You speak good. If we live, maybe we be friends. If you die, remember that women and children safe so long as Idrac is alive," the man thumped his chest and walked outside.
[Galactic Collegium - Sigtarius VII, 3791]
"What happened next?" The Dagnion girl asked, she and the rest of the class had been listening with rapt attention.
Arthur shrugged, "People died; when my unit got there, we found the planet mostly barren and a single human man, Idrac Vorstov, guarding a vault containing four hundred women and nearly five thousand children."
"Holy shit," one of the other humans said, his face going pale.
"What?" asked another student.
The Professor spoke up and pulled up an image of the man in question, "Idrac Vorstov, also known as the Terror of Tervix IX, is a mass murderer who killed seventeen thousand people and was charged with terrorism and a slew of other crimes after he beat two hundred people to death and then vented the bio-dome to the planet's atmosphere. He did not, however, kill a single child. He apparently put the children in a number of large hermetically sealed train cars bound for other domes."
Arthur nodded. "Idrac said that the creatures were still around, but the ship that had brought them had been gone for a day or two. After the last of the other fighters had fallen, he had sealed the door to the shelter and started bringing any food or other survivors to the shelter."
"How do you know all of this?" The Professor asked, he knew that Arthur was part of the unit, but he had not expected to get all the details that they had.
"I was assigned guard duty of the room where we kept Idrac as we transported him back to prison." Arthur said, "I spent a lot of time listening to him answer questions for the investigating officer."
"Wait, they still sent him to prison after all he did!" The Dagnion girl said in shock. "And what were the creatures."
"The creatures were the Vork," Arthur said, and everyone recognized the name of the species currently waging war against the Imperium. "And yes, Idrac was a terrorist and indicated that even though he had enjoyed his stint of freedom, it was only because he got to kill things. Even if the mayor had survived to recommend release for the prisoners, it would not have been granted. It is quite miraculous that it went that way, as the ship was carrying prisoners being transferred to Hades supermax in the Styx system."
Just then the five minute warning indicator pinged softly. The Professor clapped his hands and spoke, "Alright, quickly to wrap up, what does this say about the ethics of the situation?"
The Dagnion girl spoke up, "That even those who are, well, evil can sometimes make the right decision?"
"True, that might be a good take away," The Professor looked thoughtful, "what else?"
Several other students voiced their ideas, but the Professor smiled. "You are all so close. I want you to think about it and why someone like Idrac would do what he did. I want two pages by the next class."
The notification system ended the class, and the students rose to leave. As the Professor packed his bag, Arthur waited to be the last one out. He turned to the Professor, "We are all capable of great things, both evil and good. It is up to society to judge the ethics of a situation after the fact, but it is up to the individual to do the best with what they are given at the moment."
The Professor smiled, "I do thing that that is worth the two pages. Have a good weekend Arthur."
"You too, professor."
