Originally posted here in response to the quote prompt “If it bleeds, we can kill it.”

“If it bleeds, we can kill it.” Paz muttered.

“And if it farts, we can smell it. Lovely science there, Paz,” Malia snorted softly. “You’re all getting pretty creepy about this.” Still, she kept her voice soft, and watched the sides of their path carefully. She’d done her time in the space service, after all; she’d done basic training.

“The planet was supposed to be uninhabited,” Ezra complained; he, too, kept his voice quiet, but what she could hear in the tone suggested he felt betrayed. They all acted that way, like wall-building creatures had somehow done it just to thwart them. Like they were thwarted at all, just by a little ancient construction. And now they were tracking… what? They still didn’t know.

“Well, from all the satellites, it is,” she answered reasonably. “It’s not as if there’s any major cities here, no radio traffic. We know the planet has no wide-spread civilization.”

“But it has sentient life,” Vas grumbled. “And sentient life-forms cannot share a planet comfortably.”

That, of course, was completely subjective, but Vas liked to make blanket statements like that. It was easier to just let him make them. Except…

“…no, it won’t be very comfortable if we go by the ‘it’s bleeding, let’s kill it’ philosophy, will it?” She narrowly avoided slapping her hand over her mouth to keep in the words she’d already said. She’d done it now.

“Malia, don’t be stupid. It took a shot at us.”

“And we took a shot at it. And now we’re… what? Tracking it back to its lair? What happened to observe and record?”

“I’m perfectly fine,” Paz grumbled, setting one big hand over the wound where the arrow had grazed flesh, “observing and recording this thing dying.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/23976.html. You can comment here or there.