“It’s been twenty years since I’ve killed anyone.” The old woman sat on the hard tiled floor, looking up at the group before her. “It was during the last great uprising, and I was a soldier then.” She gave a small smile, as though remembering something pleasant from those years of strife and death.

“None of you would remember those days.” She continued, the five before her shuffling in their body armor. “We were younger then, and had a cause, oh yes, we had a cause. The outlying regions were the first to fall, swiftly, with no warning. Before the end of June the entire southern continent was under their control, and we wondered if there would be anyone left capable of resisting.” She shifted a little on the floor, a small pool of crimson beginning to spread from her left leg.

“You were all children then, with mothers who loved you and fathers who said the war would only be a short one and then everyone could get back to their lives.” With her right hand she swept a stray lock of gray hair from in front of her tired blue eyes. “It took another four years of hard fighting to win back what they had taken, but we did, inch by bloody inch.”

The woman on the floor, now breathing a little harder continued to hold the five others in the room in rapt silence. There was no one else to talk to, and this was their only link to the past.

“At the end of the war I was promoted to the newly formed council. I guess it was because I showed both courage and common sense during the war, but eventually I became Governor of the province and then First Council of the Region.” She looked up at the young faces, so inexperienced, their eyes wide with anticipation of her every word.

“We became lax.” The First Council, sitting on the hard cold tile floor, coughed up a little blood mixed with spit. When one of the soldiers listening to her moved forward she waved him away. “I warned the Council that we would be attacked again but they failed to listen. In the end it doesn’t help to be right when being wrong would have been better.” She laughed a little at her own joke and spit up more blood.

“I told everyone that would listen that we had to prepare for another wave of fighting. They ignored me, but I planned.” Her voice became a little stronger. “Oh, how I planned.” She smiled wider.

“We had their technology after the war. We had what they used on us, the bombs, the gasses, those things that even they didn’t have antidotes for, we improved them.” Her left hand shifted a little to avoid the growing pool of blood on the floor.

“I diverted money for research. No one knew, or those that did didn’t care what I was doing, because I was also rebuilding our country. Our schools improved. Our economy was getting stronger, and we were becoming the envy of those that traded with us. That was our mistake, but I also prepared for that.”

A sixth soldier walked into the room at that point, and the five enlisted snapped to attention.

“Ah, General Tak-Mar, I presume.” The First Council didn’t rise for her guest. “I have been assailing your troops on the history of our Region.” The woman’s skin was becoming ashen, the pool of blood spreading further into the small office space. “I was telling them about the bombs, the gasses, the other weapons that we saved from the last war.”

“I was also saying it’s been twenty years since I’ve killed anyone,” she lifted her left hand from the folds of her Council robe and pushed a small button on a hand held device, “but some things you never forget.”

The general and his five soldiers, smartly dressed in battle gear, their gray, scaly hands and red eyes with no lids, stood perfectly still. In their superior brains of pure logic and alien response they could not interpret what a single device could do. This had been an easy victory. The population of this planet had collapsed quicker than the last time, twenty years ago. The aliens would finish the total destruction of the planet this time to keep from having to return again.

From everywhere on the planet there came small explosions of gas and larger ones of radiation. Those closest to the weapons died instantly, but quickly or slowly, they all succumbed, alien and human alike. Whether they were in their ships, their transports, or on hoof, they felt the sting of the gas or watched the dissolution of the atomic structure of their friends, if they had such concepts, and their own callous skin.

Within the Council Chamber of the First Prime the old woman, dieing on the floor smiled even wider.

“There are some things you never forget.” She said again, smelling the gas as it sifted into the enclosure.

There was a small computer game that she had enjoyed as a small child. When the last man was eaten by the giant mushroom the game dissolved and you knew you had lost.

“Game over.” The woman mouthed to no one else alive in the room.