He saw, with the last of his hope, the final two guards finally start to fire at the beast, but the bullets thudded into its back without effect. Whatever power it had used to break the two other men seemed now to push the beast back into the only two men left, the blades in its hands rising behind it as it went. It did not even look at the last of its prey before slaughtering them. The ineffectual gunfire stopped. It was over.

With the final two guards dripping down the bunker walls behind him, Shahim turned. He was drenched in gore. His team member’s skull fragments still dripped down the back of his head. His right foot was soaked to the knee in the blood and guts of the soldier it had crushed. Both his arms ran wet with coarse, red blood, from his shoulders to the tips of his blades.

The prime minister was about to say something, he knew he had to, but what? What do you say to such a thing?

Shahim saw the man’s mouth open and, without ceremony, hurled one of his slick blades right at the man, felling the target of the wild attack through the chest.

Shahim paused. Then walked slowly up to the man and retrieved his knife.

It was done.

With obvious effort, he turned to the cowering family on the cots arranged against the wall.

Despite it all, despite the way he had dispatched so many tonight, the Agent who called himself Shahim Al Khazar had never thought of himself as an evil man.

Until now.

The man whose personality had been chosen to overlay this particular machine’s mind had been a lord of the Hamprect Empire. He had thought he was a noble, not only in name, but in deed. For though he had been a decorated warrior on his home world, war had never been his passion, let alone this massacre of the defenseless. These were, he was forced to admit, sentient, if primitive, people.

But as he looked down at the shaking, weeping family, he knew his duty. He had been too fast, his attack too wild, the killing too easy. He could not leave any witnesses.

* * *

He made his way carefully through the waking city cloaked in a stolen shawl. The attack had awakened the population like a hornet’s nest and over the next few weeks the entire place would be combed, house by house, by a furious and hateful national army.