From the dark, the unseen star scorched our world.

On one side, oceans and mountains boiled away in a flash. On the other, forests and cities burned to ash. Everywhere life ended.

This was how we met the Humans.

If they'd hit us any sooner, we would have been extinguished, but for a generation after the last of our kind skirted the narrow line between life and death on the out system colonies. Every breath stale with recycled air. Every drink tinged with salt from countless cycles through our bodies. Every bite of food, cold and putrid, pulled straight from the algae tanks.

But it was enough, just barely enough to sustain our bodies.

Though, in truth, for our souls it did far more than that. It fed our anger and confusion. It fed our desire to know why, and in our darker moments, it fed our need to visit the same horrific destruction on those who did this to us.

So it fell to the next generation.

They cobbled together what they could find scattered among the ruins. They gathered the ashes of our once great world, and fashioned something new. They redesigned and repurposed and turned the void between worlds into their home in ways the first generation could never have dreamed.

With a cold fire burning in their generation’s heart, stoked by the old ones who could still remember the day the world burned, they laid the great keel of The Ship.

Every scrap of material, mined or looted from the past, every surge of energy gathered from our star, every facet of life turned to the completion of The Ship.

Her mammoth drives would carry the next generation to the star, so distant only the most powerful instrumentation could show its dim flicker, from which the great blow had come.

So here I sit. The ones we left behind, spent on the creation of our great vessel, have surely perished. I command what is left of my race as we sit in orbit over the third world of the once distant sun.

We burned a path from the cold edges of their system right to its very heart. They tried to stop us. But we would not be denied. We left ruin in our wake.

Near their center, we found horrors. Their belt was a factory of death. Hundreds of thousands of rocks weaponized with great drives of their own, each one a world killer. Even now, we can see the fusion trails of rocks burning towards their unknowing targets.

Their worlds are shattered, except their placid, blue marble and here we've stayed our vengeance. Our Mantel has always been to understand first, and execute second.

So we sent our question of why they do this. We ask what they could possibly derive from this slaughter of distant peoples.

Their answer was simple. Wouldn't you have done the same?

I find myself sickened by this. Not just for the raw brutality. Not just that an entire race can be so twisted as to see the stars filled with monsters.

I find myself sickened because of how much I want to end them, of how much I want to justify the fears that lead them to this callous and fearful state.

So it falls to my generation, the third and final, to decide.