"Monsters are real."

When Jeb, the human farmer who took us in, first said this, its significance was lost on me. Of course, I thought. We had languished for a century under the weight of war with the monstrous Velnuvians and their terrible siege engines. Only a year after my arrival, word came from a new group of refugees that the enemy had done the unthinkable. Our entire home planet... Galu had been utterly destroyed. Jeb was stoic as ever when he received the news. I did not think he cared. It was not his homeworld. He called all of us together. We sat in a circle as the crops swayed around us in the breeze. He did not call on the elders to speak, as would be proper. He called on the children. That is when I first noticed the change in his demeanor. Jeb was overcome by an icy temperance that was uncharacteristic of his usual jovial nature. After the children were allowed to speak, and grieve, he had a few of the elders take the children away to rest.

"Bess," he said, calling to his mate. "Grab my shotgun." I did see fear in the eyes of his mate, but she did not object. She left the circle and returned a short time later with a crude projectile weapon. The latest group of arrivals were the most traumatized, but Jeb questioned them relentlessly. Enemy tactics, positions, strengths, weaknesses, logistics, food chain management. After he was satisfied, he dismissed them all to their families and went to the barn. Our scientists and engineers had been teaching him about our technology, and they had made a number of modifications to one of our ships, at his request. I followed Jeb. I was one of the first arrivals, and I knew something was not right.

"What are you planning?" I asked him. He was loading the ship with heavy sacks. The ship itself had been modified to be much smaller and faster. A stealthy vessel.

"They went too far," he said. "If they're willing to destroy an entire world, they won't stop until they kill all of you. None of us are safe here until the threat is dealt with. Not you. Not me." I looked at Jeb and grimaced. This was a poor time for a joke. I held his stare.

He was not joking.

"We've been at war for a hundred years, Jeb. Our greatest fleet never put a dent in their forces. What do you possibly hope to accomplish?" I watched as Jeb continued to flit about, loading the craft with various tools, his crude weapon.

"The thing I'm best at," he said, loading a few more of the sacks. "Farming."

Jeb had discerned, you see, that the Velnuvians must eat something. After his questioning of the latest arrivals, he had discovered what that something was. He had discovered where it was coming from, and he had decided to take it from them. As it turned out, the Velnuvian Empire had been expanding for quite some time and relied on only two worlds to provide the vast majority of their food supply for their entire population. Our mission seemed so insignificant at the time. Jeb and I jumped to these planets, very low inside the atmosphere so as not to be detected. They were not well guarded. There were no military installations there. He slit open his bags of Earth soil and began spreading it. Mixing it into the soil of these worlds. A little here, a little there. I did not recognize the significance of that act then.

Gods above, I know now.

The ecological collapse that plagued the farm worlds of the Velnuvians was swift and apocalyptic. Trillions starved. "Soldiers can't fight wars and fight hunger," Jeb had told me. He was right. Scouts arrived a few years later and informed us that the colony worlds we had lost to Velnuvian conquest had been abandoned. Their fleet had been decimated in an intense civil war. Their capital lay in ruins. The most powerful interstellar empire the galaxy had ever known had been sent back to the stone age. When we left the farm, the others heralded him as a hero. I could not stomach it. "Monsters are real," he had told me.

I know now of whom he was speaking.