[ WP ] A peaceful alien race is besieged by another race in the same galaxy . As their last planets fall and their home-world comes under threat they do the unthinkable . They ask for aid from the only known creatures more brutal than their foes in exchange for FTL technology . Humans accept the deal .

When they came to us, they had no idea what we were capable of. 
 
 They knew we were violent even towards each other and that we had a long history of war, but they did n't understand our capacity for individual violence. 
 
 They're a hive, as are most species in the universe, so they claim. The idea of individualism is foreign to them, and because of that non-understanding of individualism, they can not fathom the idea of murder, or the difference between murder and war. 
 
 The war on their world was going badly for them. Their opponent was another pure hive mind, a single mind with many bodies, but it was special, with the evolved trait of possession. They had seen, had felt themselves taken, and they knew the horror and pain of being ripped from the mind net, feeling it from the last moments of the taken bodies. 
 
 It was that extreme fear and horror that drove them to us, to people whos biology they did n't understand and whos brains they can not penetrate, knowing only that their enemy fights and conquers by assimilating other species and that we could not be assimilated, making us an ideal army. 
 
 So we did what we were hired to do. We filed out of their ships, onto their planet, and we marched towards the enemy. 
 
 A single mind, however vast its body may be, can not keep up with the actions and tactics of many minds working separately toward a single goal, and one by one, the many branches of the Enemy Pure Hive were killed, until there was a single body left to contain it. 
 
 We killed that, too, and for the first time since the universe began, an entire Hive was *gone*. Not rare, not combined, but completely and utterly *gone*. 
 
 The Hive was horrified by our cold, efficient slaughter of an entire being. They had meant for us to merely kill enough branches to drive the Enemy Pure Hive away. 
 
 Instead we taught them the difference between war and murder.
