There were no good choices.

We were barely an army; at best we were a terror band, sowing mischief and mayhem across seven continents.

We 'won' because they weren't like us - the more we killed them, the more we figured that out. They were pretty much top-heavy in terms of momentum, command structure, everything - kill the slave masters at the top, and the pyramid goes down. And that's what we did.

So you'll understand what we were dealing with - there was no one to negotiate with, no one's hand to shake.

And it wasn't like they were ready to be our friends and huddle round camp fires singing kumbaya just because we'd fry-cooked their masters' heads with a plasma gun. Nah - they were pissed, full up of rage and hate and - for their first time in their lives - lacking anyone capable of telling them what to do. But they still had all the guns, all the high tech - all the gene-kicking superiority to run roughshod over pretty much everyone left in the world but us.

And, well... the other thing you've gotta remember is - well, we just didn't trust the rest of you. You gave up, remember? Turned over the keys to the world in exchange for the cure to cancer and a pat on the head. We couldn't let you choose, because if history told us anything, it's that you'd choose wrong.

We had to be sure.

We had to protect the species.

We'd proven we were the only ones that could.

I saw good men and women die from rejection syndrome when we stuffed their bodies full of steel to make them better soldiers. I remember the look on one girl's face after she watched her sister die in agony on the operating table. She asked what table was hers, and told the doctors to get on with it. She survived. She was one of the first.

We lost hundreds in a week without the bad guys even firing a single shot, because we had to catch up, and we didn't have time to do it safe. We didn't have time to do it right. The only thing we kept was our goddamn right to choose, and every last one of us who died went to the operating tables did it willingly.

That's not to say that some people didn't go there in chains. But that's what collaborators are for.

Do or die. Do, or everyone dies.

We were necessary monsters.

I gave the order every time, and I'd do it again. If I had my time back, the only thing I'd do differently is that I wouldn't have questioned it so much at the time.

Fair, equitable war is a luxury you have when it's ideology at stake. When you don't know, with absolute certainty, that the only thing that awaits you should you fail is everything you love being tossed into the grinder to feed an alien war machine. To prop up a dying species that had plagued the galaxy for centuries past its extinction date.

Some people say that they can't even recognise us anymore, but I can. My men, my women, they turned their arms to iron, their hearts to dust. I shaped them into machine and hate. I gave them mind-readers and magic. No road was left untaken. No sacrifice was left unmade.

We didn't have the cities, we didn't have the armies, we didn't have the time. We couldn't be sure we had the popular will. Prisons are what you make when you know you can contain things. We didn't. We had a handful of ruins and a mankind scattered to the winds in shanty towns and caves. They still held what few cities remained.

If we had a hundred years to fix things - a hundred years to make ourselves a civilization again - maybe we could have picked a more humane option. Maybe we could have figured out if they even deserved one. Or if they could ever learn to be anything more than killing machines.

But we didn't.

We had months, maybe, while we still held the momentum. If we waited, we'd lose everything. That we were here at all was the result of a thousand miracles, each one I had no guarantee of repeating.

So I gave the order, as I always had. I chose for the species, because you left me no choice.

Kill them all, wherever they may be found.

Kill them all, no matter the cost.

Kill them all.