Eventually Shahim stopped fighting, refusing to move again, or to acquiesce, and glared at his opponent with his one good eye.

“Why?” said Agent Shahim Al Khazar.

John paused a second, tactical systems still running. But this was not a problem for them. This was for the man alone, and he considered his reply.

“You ask me why, Lord Mantil of Hamprect?” John said, eventually. “You ask me why I am doing what I am doing? You have the audacity to ask me why I am trying to stop you killing seven billion innocent souls so that the Princess Lamatis of our world can have more lands to fight over? Well, I do not need to explain myself to you, you genocidal bastard. Tell me, Lord Mantil of Hamprect, what reason do you have for attempting to bring about the death of an entire race of intelligent beings we have never even spoken with? How do you excuse your behavior?”

Shahim stared at John Hunt. His machine mind was listing the extensive damage he had suffered, still striving to come up with tactical options. Among those options, and now disturbingly close to the top of it, was his self-destruct sequence. It listed his chance of successfully detonating before Agent John Hunt could disable him at 12%. Shahim switched off the display, and disabled his defensive systems, facing his destruction with what dignity he still had left.

As he thought of how he was going to die, he thought about John’s question. Why was he here? He thought of the family of the prime minister of Pakistan. The humans were very different from what he had previously thought of as intelligent beings: they walked strangely, their strange hands were disturbingly long and slender, they ate meat, sometimes even raw, something no Mobiliei had done in an age, and all these things repulsed him. But he could not deny that they were intelligent, and nor could he honestly say that he had been untouched by the innocence of the prime minister’s young daughters. But he had killed them. He had slaughtered them unflinchingly after killing their father in front of their horrified eyes, and as he thought about it, he knew that it was one thing to kill a soldier with a gun or missile. But this, this was something different.

“I have no answer for you, Agent John Hunt.” said Shahim with the few scraps of pride he could muster, “End this, I have disabled my self-destruct mechanism, end this and leave. You have your victory. The rest of the Agents will think that somehow the humans killed me and they may well retaliate against them, but you may still be able to survive this if you leave now.”