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we run the risk that they will escape and sound the alarm before we can escape!
    If we kill them they will certainly retaliate in kind, Noo said tightly. They communicate with one another through those things they carry. We cannot allow them to alert the others and if we attack we cannot be certain that we can take them all down before one of them manages to sound the alarm.

    They mean to kill us now! Rak retorted. You think that they will be more determined to kill us if we kill three of theirs?
    I think that if they find out that we have killed three of theirs that they will lock down the space station and make it harder for us to escape!
    If that is true, then it seems to me that we must kill all of them. We can take the forms, but they know one another. They will know we are not those whose forms we have stolen.
    Noo considered that while they were settling into the positions they had chosen. We will kill them if we must. I did not say that you could not if you find it necessary. I said not to kill them unless it is. But Dae is right.
    I think we must take them all out. They will know that we are not their team mates when we can only assume their forms. We will use that, however, to, hopefully, take out the other half of the team once we have secured the first half.
    No one was more surprised than Noo when his plan worked so smoothly that it was almost as if the humans had planned it themselves. On the other hand, the humans had no idea that they could change forms because the humans not only could not, but they had not observed them changing forms. They merely blended with their surroundings, waited until the moment was right and managed to seize the first three and shoot them with their weapons before they could do more than to begin to struggle. It was unfortunate, for them, that they had set their weapons to kill, but since their own survival depended upon making certain the humans were not able to sound an alarm Noo did not waste a lot of time agonizing over it or suffer any qualms once done.
    After studying his own kill carefully for several moments, he mimicked it as closely as he could and then carefully hid the body. When Dae and Rak had completed their own transformation and hidden the other two guards, they sought the remainder of the team out. Guided by their thoughts, they had no trouble locating them even with the distracting scents that surrounded them.
    They discovered one had been left to stand guard at the entrance. That one was nearly their undoing since they had not figured out, yet, how to make the sounds that the humans made. More accurately, they had studied them very carefully and understood their communications, but they had not had any opportunity to practice it themselves. He had not considered it safe to do so when they were so closely monitored. Fortunately, although the guard was almost immediately suspicious when they did not respond to his verbal hail, they still managed to prevent him from sounding an alarm.
    As exhilarated as he was to finally achieve freedom and to have escaped the fate intended for them, he was disgusted that they had not been able to manage it without killing. He had begun to understand the species and whether Dae or Rak agreed with his assessment or not, he knew that the humans would be far more alarmed and frantic to hunt them down and kill them when they discovered the bodies. Not killing the guards would not have prevented a hunt. The humans would still have hunted them, but they might have done so with the intention of merely recapturing them otherwise. Now, they would be determined to kill them on sight.
    That thought put him in mind of the devices they used to record them and he took the time to destroy the machine they used to make their recordings. He was not happy about the necessity. It would have been far better if they had had time to merely disable the devices for recording that were inside the habitat, but they had not had enough time to do that once