Falmo'o woke up with a jerk. He had been sleeping standing up, not uncommon for his race, but still slightly embarrassing. When he started to move he groaned, his muscles aching. He opened his eyes but everything was pitch black.

"So, can you understand me?" a voice asked. Female, using Unified Galactic Standard.

"Yes," Falmo'o said, starting to turn. Something pulled painfully at his temples and he jerked, which hurt worse.

"Don't worry about your voice. That's normal when you've got a fab-run induction rod shoved through your speech cortex. It took me a few times to get you right. I might have butchered your brain a few times, champ," the female voice said.

"Who are you?" Falmo'o asked, looking around. "Why is it so dark?"

"Call me Dee Taynee, champ," the voice said. "It's not dark, I just wasn't worried about your visual cortex, I've got everything I need from that."

Falmo'o felt his stomachs sink. "Where am I?"

"Ah ah ah, I'll ask the questions, new friend," the female's voice was mocking. "So where were you born?"

Falmo'o gave a shudder. "I'll tell you nothing."

He remembered growing up on Tannermeirlee.

"Your family?" was the next question.

"I will not answer you," Falmo'o said.

Remembered his mother, father, two sisters, and his brother.

"Who do you work for and how did you end up working for them?" the female asked.

Remembered school, remembered being selected for the Executor Council, remembered being selected for the Covert Action Force.

"And what was your easiest mission?" the voice asked.

He was too caught up in remembering it. It was fairly easy, just tanking the stocks of a neo-sapient corporation and forcing its sell-off so the species had no choice but to be absorbed.

Every time the voice asked something, he would say he would not speak, but he remembered it all with crystal clarity. Sometimes everything would go dark, other times it would be brightly lit all white.

After some time he felt an itching feeling between his ears and his vision came back.

The primate female. Dee Taynee. She was naked except for a piece of metal in one hand and a rivet gun in the other.

"Wanna see what I did to you, Falmy? Since we're good friends and all?" she asked, with a big grin that made Falmo'o give a moan of fear. She held up the piece of metal and it was buffed into a mirror. She gave a big smile and angled it.

Falmo'o's skull was laid bare and cracked open, probes shoved into his brain, wired coiled away with little white tags on them. His implant was missing, torn away, wires jammed into his brain where the implant had been. His lower jaw was missing, seared and cauterized, his side eyes had wires stuck into the empty eye sockets.

He had "USDA CANNER BEEF" painted on his chest even though he couldn't understand the markings.

"I know everything about you, Falmy," the pink skinned primate said. "I know things about you that you never even admitted to yourself," she leaned forward, pursed her lips, and made a weird sucking noise on the side of his long nose. "I know all about what you liked to do with those little neo-sapient females."

She leaned back. "And I know why. Naughty naughty cow man," she waved one extended finger back and forth.

"Welp, lots of killing to do," she said. She raised the rivet gun and put a two foot long duralloy rivet in the middle of his chest.

"You die so easy," she said, almost in wonder.

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

Falmo'o groaned and opened his eyes. He was supported by some kind of cradle made of wide straps, his neck in some kind of collar that prevented it from moving, and straps around his chest to keep his upper chest upright. His four arms were limp at his sides, hands dangling, and he couldn't feel anything.

In front of him was one of the big guys. A Combine Marine. Strapped to a table with the top of his head cut open, exposing the Terran's brain, which had wires and probes stuck into it.

The female taynee her name is taynee was standing beside him, holding onto a flat display pad that had a thick cable running from it to an open computer case where the wires seemed almost attached at random. She had a white tube with a burning end in her mouth and was exhaling smoke.

She wore nothing else.

"Define Hellcore Prime Mathematics, Technical Specialist," the female said. Falmo'o could understand and recognize Combine language and noted, distantly, that she spoke it perfectly.

"Tech Specialist Grade Six Dumata, 3384-847-117431, Combine Marine Corps," the big Terran male said.

"Fascinating," the female said, staring at the datapad. "The math is reminiscent of my mat-trans formula, and looks like it overlaps. Could this be where the nightmares and cascading resonance errors came from?"

Falmo'o coughed and the female held up a single extended finger.

"You wait your turn," she said.

"How were you able to disable me, Dee Taynee?" the large human groaned. "You're only human."

"THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS ONLY HUMAN!" the human female screamed, her face turning red.

Falmo'o didn't hear it.

The crashing rage infused psychic scream had turned his brain into a slurry before the second syllable.

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

Falmo'o opened his eyes and stared. The human female was sitting, naked, a knife in one hand and a rivet gun in the other. She had a cigarette in her mouth and some kind of strange visor over her eyes that was leaking light as it flashed thousands of times a second.

"Yess... yesssss... give me all your secrets..." the human female whispered to herself. "Humane Genome Project succeeded? Yesssss... FTL methods? Yessss... That's right, give me aaaaaahllll your secrets."

Her back suddenly arched and she gasped. The light leaking around stopped. She collapsed limply onto the table she had been sitting on, her hands falling to either side. Blood leaked out from under the visor, from her ears, from her nose.

There was the sound of bare flesh slapping on metal. It got closer and closer until Taynee walked into sight. She bent down and picked up the cigarette the dead version of her had dropped, took a long drag, and exhaled smoke. She picked up the knife and jumped up, parking her butt on the edge of the table. When she saw Falmo'o was awake and staring at her she smiled.

She slapped her own dead leg several times. "Gotta watch that maximum overload," she laughed. "Burnt my visual and pre-frontal cortex right out," she slapped her own leg again. "Welp, them's the risks with tech like this."

It sounded almost like a ritualistic saying to Falmo'o.

He tried to speak and found that all he could make was gobbling sounds. Taynee ignored him as she stripped the headset off the corpse. She jumped off, grabbed her dead body and flipped it off the table.

"Welp, out with the old," she said, putting on the headset. She jumped back up on the table and sat there. "And in with the new."

The light started flashing and she gave a low moan of mixed pleasure and pain.

"My God, you all advanced so slow. Children, all of you, ignorant children," she gasped at one point.

Falmo'o watched as the whole thing was repeated four more times. The one on the table would die, another one would come in, put on the headset, and the light would flash until they died.

Finally the last one gave a sharp gasp and relaxed, reaching up and pulling off the mask.

"Such a rush," she smiled. She wiped the blood off from under her nose and looked at it. "Got close to overload that time."

She jumped down off the table, walking over and picking up a pack of the cigarettes from a table. She lit the end of it with a cutting torch then set the torch down before moving in front of Falmo'o.

"I wish I'd have had you in the Overproject Whisper labs. We could have gotten further with Project Charon if you'd been there to dissect," she leaned forward and licked the side of his jaw. "Over and over and over."

She leaned back, tapping the rivet gun against her leg. She turned around, heading over to computer screens that Falmo'o could barely see.

"Short sighted mewling fools. Morality wrapped in lab-coats bleating about the sanctity of life and the ethics of what we were doing," she said. Falmo'o noted the back of her neck was getting red, as were her ears. "They started talking about what we shouldn't do rather than what we could do. Started talking about Congressional Oversight, as if those doddering senile fools could understand a tenth of what I'd learned while in public school."

She whipped around, glaring at Falmo'o. "You'd have liked them. They were more interested in the status quo than advancing humanities knowledge. All that crap talk about getting along with a world full of sheep, full of consumers who were little more than appetites and primordial reflexes that we protected without them knowing about it all those decades."

She glared at Falmo'o. "People like you, defending the status quo and bleating about what's right and what isn't right," her voice was getting louder and Falmo'o could feel his head start to pound from the hatred radiating from her.

She suddenly lifted up the rivet gun and pressed it against his chest. "PEOPLE LIKE YOU CALLED ME A CRIMINAL! ME! I ADVANCED HUMANITY! I AM HUMANITY!"

She triggered the rivet gun with each word.

But Falmo'o didn't feel it. The sheer psychic scream poured off her and turned his brain to mulch.

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

Falmo'o woke up and realized he could feel his limbs. He looked down and realized he was strapped to a table, his upper torso flat on the table, his legs folded under his flanks but still strapped down, heavy wide straps across his body.

"Scream! Scream for me!" Taynee shouted. "AHAHAHAHAHAHA! Devour of Stars my ass. You're weak and your kind will not survive the coming nuclear winter. I will strip every secret from your hive-mind. I will consume your thoughts like that of that stupid Lanaktallan, like those blithering Combine children, like those gibbering Imperium idiots. Weak minded simpletons. All of you! I will use your flesh to create weapons and rain them down upon that insipid mootaur's worlds by the billions while you scream."

Falmo'o groaned.

She was still here. Still alive.

"Oh, you're awake," Taynee said. Her voice seemed even, calm, and he could hear her walking barefoot toward him. "Well, you aren't brain dead like the last few."

She shook her head. "The locks on your genetic code were clever for children. In reality, they were inelegant, simplistic, and as obvious as a cat turd on a fine china plate," she said, leaning against the table and lighting a cigarette. "Since you don't mind genetic alteration, I did some for you."

She laughed as his tendrils curled in horror. "Better, faster, stronger, tougher because, God, I'm tired of how hard it is to keep you alive, smarter, more memory capacity, all that good stuff."

She leaned down and licked up his nose.

"I could make a thousand of you, Falmy. A million. That egg provides me with all the biomass I need," She laughed, her small nose touching between his front eyes. "I could seed your homeworlds with millions of you. Billions of you from the biomass in that hive. Well, they'd probably prefer that I didn't use them as biomass, but since when has the wants of an obviously defective species mattered?"

She knows, Falmo'o thought to herself.

"Right now, you're like the originals of your species," she said, leaning back. "It was simplicity to undo the genetic alterations you did to yourselves to stop evolution," she leaned forward and whispered into Falmo'o's ear. "Your species is weak, Falmo'o. It deserves what I'm going to do to it. What humanity is going to do to it. The only reason your species still exists is because you brought other weak species into your herd to surround you in layer after layer of tasty tasty meat for the predators to eat."

She leaned back. "I admire ruthlessness. I really really do," she licked her lips slowly. "But it wasn't ruthlessness, it was cowardice."

She exhaled smoke across his nostrils and to his surprise, he didn't cough. He could smell the smoke, but it didn't bother his sinuses.

It bothered him that a clear nictating membrane suddenly covered his eyes.

She giggled. "I thought about adjusting you. Making you into a living bioweapon, since your people are particularly enamored with them."

She jumped down and walked back and forth, the cigarette in her mouth, her hands clasped behind her back, leaning forward slightly.

"Every day your species produces between 35 and 60 gallons of methane per day per mootuar," she said. "The flatulence always contains bacteria and viruses, harmless to your people as it fills your intestinal tract. You actually need those microbes to digest properly."

She stopped and looked at him, leaning forward slightly. "I can change that. I should change it."

She jumped up again, moving over to what looked like a primitive cryotube. "I could run you a few times through my baby here, take you apart, adjust you, put you back together each time."

"Send you back improved, Falmy," she said. "New and improved."

She moved over and started to lower a duraglass cover of Falmo'o. She moved back over and tapped a key on the mechanical keyboard.

Mist started to fill the tube.

"You always were my favorite. That's why I'm going to let you go. Go home."

She pressed her face against the outside of the tube. "Sorry about losing it and eating you that one time. You shouldn't make me angry."

It felt like he was being torn apart by red hot needles, millions of them at once.

"You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

He couldn't even scream.

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

Go home

"Come on, we can make it," the voice said. It was Lanaktallan, helping him move down one of the docking tubes. "We'll take the human ship, get away before she finds us."

Go home

Falmo'o put his legs stiff, sliding to a stop. He was dressed in armor with his sabotage kit on his chest, his weapons on him. Terran blood spattered on his chest.

The other Lanaktallan had on a set of security boarding armor with the name Ukvo'ok on the chest.

"No, we can't," Falmo'o said. He coughed, tasted blood, and looked around. "We cant' go back."

Go home.

"Why? Why not? We're lucky she left that knife of hers where you could kick it to me," Ukvo'ok said, staring at the other Lanaktallan. "If she comes back and finds us gone, she'll go crazy on us, well, crazier."

Go home.

Falmo'o coughed. "She wants us to escape. Wants us to get out," he coughed again. "Don't ask me how I know, I just do."

Ukvo'ok stared at him. "We've done this before, haven't we? Over and over."

Falmo'o nodded. He thought for a second.

There was a way to stop her. Only one way to stop her.

"You get to the Demands Answers and get out of here. I'll buy you time," Falmo'o said. They weren't far from where he'd first woken up. He leaned forward and whispered a statement, an order, an instruction into Ukvo'ok's ear. The other Executor nodded, his tendrils curling and his ridges inflating with anxiety.

"Good luck, Most High," Ukvo'ok said. He clattered away, heading for the Executor ship.

Falmo'o knew he wouldn't make it back. That the ship would be empty.

But that was all right. Better than all right. None of them could ever leave this station.

Mathematics are mathematics, went through his head as he hurried over to the grav-lift. He looked up and down, seeing that it was empty both ways. He stepped in and touched the lights going up, taking him to the top of the station.

He circled the Hellcore room, moving quickly, until he found what he was looking for.

The control/experimentation room for the Hellcore in the center of the top of the station. It took him long minutes to find a cable that led directly to the Hellcore. It was Terran design, but standard as far as Hellcores went.

He'd worked with a few, once in a while dead Precursor machines were found by neo-sapients and they attempted to research it.

It had been Falmo's job to destroy it and the research.

The design was similar enough that the differences were hard to detect until Falmo'o ran into them. He knew he was sweating and twice he pulled cud from his pouched and jammed it in his jaws, chewing on it as he worked.

The coordinates weren't hard. His brain seemed to work faster than ever, knowledge just popping into his mind, connections coming easy to him.

He saw the Demand Answers had crossed the boundary of the bubble and vanished.

I'm going to send you home, Falmy, echoed in his mind. Go home, Falmy, go home. Go home.

He knew the Hellcore would be glowing now, full of energy. He typed as fast as he could. He'd done this five times in real life, hundreds of times in simulation.

It was the only sure way to dispose of a Hellcore.

He was about to press the activation key when he smelled it.

Cigarette smoke.

"Whatcha doin, Falmy? I told you to go home," the voice was female, Terran, a slight edge of anger in it. He could tell she was standing in the narrow blind spot all Lanaktallan had between the side eyes and rear spot.

"Nothing," Falmo'o replied. "Don't call me that."

"I thought we were friends, Falmy," the Terran's voice was closer.

"You're a primitive barbaric species who the universe would have been better off if you'd never passed the Great Filters," Falmo'o shot back, hitting the execute key and then typing rapidly, as if he wasn't done yet. The pulses from the Hellcore were coming faster and faster.

"Stop that," the Terran female snapped.

"Make me," Falmo'o said. He could feel it, the ravening ripping tendrils of Hellspace attacking his mind.

The legs wrapped around his waist as the human landed on his flanks. The rivet gun pressed against his side and there was a thudding noise. Once, twice, three times. A knife stabbed into his back.

Everything started to go dim but the pulses suddenly stopped and extended off into eternity.

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

The Hellrip opened less than a kilometer from the station, pulling it in, yanking it into Hellspace.

Dee Taynee laughed. It didn't matter. She'd installed a mat-trans on their stupid ship.

The Devourer of Stars had marked her, she knew it, left its appetites within her.

But that was all right, what was a Goddess without any appetites or vices?

She felt herself being pulled into Hellspace and rejoiced. Felt the bubble go down and stared out at the stars, feeling a new and urgent hunger to consume them fill her.

Her first FTL travel.

It lasted a split second.

The other end was inside the neutron star.

The star shuddered for a moment, then went still. The gravity lensing stopped, radiation crashed onto the surface then radiated away like normal. Gravity reasserted its rightful place and crushed the structure on its surface into a molecule thick smear.

The neutron star drifted through space, merrily doing neutron star things. The infection inside of it had been destroyed by a surge of energy, but it didn't care.

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

On the empty ship Demands Answers, sitting in the radioactive desert, was an addition. In the cargo hold.

A mat-trans chamber. A machine where time and space had no meaning unless it was programmed in.

The radiation put out by the blasted desert seeped through the torn and rent hull. Through the crew spaces. Into the hold.

And began attacking the memory circuits of the mat-trans.

Affecting the buffer.

Inside the buffer Dee Taynee screamed and raved, throwing herself against the walls of her tiny prison, shrieking at what she could see with her electronic senses.

A simple piece of tape over the latch of the mat-trans doorframe.

Preventing the latch from catching and the mat-trans from activating and reassembling what was in the buffer.

Bit by bit the radiation ate away at the memory.

Dee Taynee felt herself slip away bit by bit.

And screamed in rage.