[ WP ] An alien race encounters the most terrifying predator imaginable . A lone , unarmed human .

We had tracked the hulk for centuries as it slowly drifted towards us, barely moving compared to the craft outside the exclusion zone. Eventually something had to be done about it of course. A new council was convened. Then, following the usual outcry as to why the councils had more exo's than endo's, and why only two invertebrates had been included, it all ended up with the usual tribunals, hearings and raft of new legislation that every action takes. Our government just made you wish that your species would have that referendum on receding to the monocultures. 
 
 The hulk approached closer, as hulks are wont to do. It was amusingly complex, so over engineered that it was more a floating group of redundant systems than a ship. 
 
 I tell you this so you understand better. You know what we face now. But then, we were innocent. We could not forsee the consequences. The hulk was an interesting object, nothing more. We were curious. We were fools. 
 
 The first party entered the hulk without incident. Initial examinations found almost nothing living save single celled organisms. A few fungi were present, though so far removed that I almost insult their relatives to name them with the same term. The only thing of note was the vast amounts of thin cylinders on board. Thousands of them were found in sealed containers, etched intricately at the microscopic level. Hundreds were destroyed as we tried to extract the data, before some bright spark realised that the scratchings were in base 2. Further parties followed the first to aid in the exploration of the deeper areas of the vessel. 
 
 That was when we found the guardian. 
 
 It did n't show on initial scans due to the primitive form of stasis that it had been placed in. Some idiot scientist decided to wake it up there and then, to try and communicate with it I suppose, grab the glory for himself. Recordings retrieved from the dead show it ignored those present until it had checked some form of terminal adjacent to its capsule. Then it paused, before keying a sequence of some sort. Once it saw what we had done, it started killing. 
 
 It fought like no species our conglomerate had ever encountered. There was no warning. No decorum, just brutality. It crushed the neck of the researcher who awoke it while staring into its eyes. It thrust straight through two exo's with its forelimbs, before bludgeoning an invertebrate to a pulp with the corpses. Perfectly fitted to the narrow halls, it rampaged, killing anything it could find. 
 
 Of course, the alarm was raised relatively quickly, and marines stormed the hulk the same day. But it was too late. A few hours was all it needed. Warriors dissapeared squad by squad, the guardian slashing them to pieces before returning to the shadows, exploiting the ships labyrinthine passages to kill and then melt back into the darkness. Two days went by like this. The marines retreated. The creature was obviously not going to be captured, and further casualties would be harder to cover up. 
 
 So we sucked all the oxygen out of the ship, and sent in the collection team. When it was n't killing, it could almost have been called beautiful; the flow of its hair, the softly curved hips or the rounded mammaries. Someone could make a sculpture once it was declassified, I remember thinking. We nuked the hulk as soon as we recovered the bodies. 
 
 Decades later, the others folded in. Thousands of them, all identical, and all male. Reduced to cloning to survive after some horrific war between themselves. The hulk had been sent out as a repository, to ensure the survival of their species. Apparently she had sent out a distress signal the moment she awoke. The damage to their genome records had been irreparable. The'humans' did not take well to us killing the last female of their species, or the destruction of their future. They want their revenge. 
 
 So now we fight them. They give no quarter. The sole survivor of their war, the pinnacle of generations of fighting now preys on us across countless worlds. A lone human, replicated a thousand thousand times with just one purpose: the destruction of all other life it can find. Creator help us all.
