The scout regarded the Regional Subdirector for a long moment, before carefully removing her helmet and looking at it with her naked skull.

"Regional Subdirector, we are ALL unliving creatures. And there are currently no War Droids - construct forces - within the facility anyway, as they are all deployed in defensive positions protecting us - and your own facility, I might add - from the Azura."

She put her helmet back on.

"So what you are asking is that we expose ourselves to be attacked and destroyed by the Azura, who can then enter your facility completely unchecked and loot it entirely unopposed.

"Regional Subdirector, you are aware that we are currently the only thing standing between your museum and the Azura? If we walk outside, we will be wiped out to minimal losses to the Azura. A task force we have repelled once already, but which your own forces have previusly failed to defeat. 

"Do you think that if we are wiped out, you will be able to retake your facility from the Azura which what forces you have left while THEY are entrenched within. Assuming, of coruse, they simply don't destroy it?

"Because it sounds to me, Region Subdirector, that you don't really want your facility protected. That you demand we commit suicide before you are prepared to talk tells me that you are not prepared to negotiate with good faith or with honour. Your attitude also makes you as a bigot, judging others on their physical construction and vitality. Would you make such a demand of any creature not made of flesh, I wonder? Because if you have an objection to the very existance of anything that is not alike and fleshy, I'm afraid you and your people in for a rude awakening. Like it or not, the Azura have arrived here and drawn attention to you. We won't be the first to come, nor will we be the last and the next ones, organic or not, might no choose to attempt to speak to you. So you have a decision to make. 

"You can continue and make enemies of us and go back to tell your bosses that you, personally, utterly failed in your duty to protect one of your people's sacred places and that you have assured you will be fighting a war on two fronts against two space-faring powers that are stronger than you - or you get down off your palanquin and we can discuss working TOGETHER to expel the Azura from your planet and your system.

"Choose carefully, Regional Subdirector of Long Term Memory, because you are literally deciding the future fate of your entire people and civilisation."

The scout commander might have been laying it on a little thick... But she really didn't like bigots or arrogant, incompetant buraucrats, and the Subdirector was clearly both.

Behind her, the rest of the scout team, without being obvious, prepared to fight. She was very quick on the draw with her MLA pistol - a legacy of a life spend being picked on for being a female and a half-elf on the petty human backwater planet she'd been born on. If the Regional Subdirector reacted with any kind of kill-them-all-hysteria, she would personally guarentee he wouldn't live to finish the sentence.

	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*

"We'll try it," Velinkar said. It cost the Aotrs nothing to provide intelligence on the Strayvians. (What were the going to do, shake their fists and shout "curse you, Undead!" And they had their hands full with the Shardan and their allies as well as their invasion...)

He privately wondered how much of a nasty shock the Azura would come up against the Strayvians. They might be big, but the Strayvians had changed a great deal in the past couple of centuries. They weren't now the runners-up behind the Cybertanks for Most Stupid Stratagists In The Galaxy anymore, not having finally pulled their act together. (There was some concern they might have been taking a few too many leaves out of the Aotrs' own playbook. Strayvians using an Aotrs outlook was only a bit less terrifying than the Shardan and Lazerblasters...)

"My aide will work with you to sort out the fine details. Would it be better for them to negotiate with us, or would you have more effective clout with them if they think that your presense already means we're subserviant to an Azura?"