Kolvax, standing in the center of the circular assembly room, looked up at the suspended crystal imager and yawned. There was the soundless monochrome image of a human woman, tromping up and down happily in a vat — dancing, the Xylanx presumed, in the blood of her enemies. A sure sign of a vicious people. And there she was again in another fragment: evidently a prisoner, she was forced, along with another slave, to stuff her mouth with dark morsels carried along by a conveyor. The segment ended there, but the Xylanx assumed that death had surely followed. A fiendish method of execution, showing that even the mightiest human could be brought low. Kolvax looked away, annoyed. How many times could this thing be rerun? The seconds of video had no context now, nor had they ever: Kolvax even suspected that, viewed outside the martial lens of the Xylanx, they might be part of some human entertainment rather than a political message. There was something comic about the woman, in a curious way.
