Excerpt: Aspect

We'd figured out the Folders' language by then, so we can't say they didn't warn us, but there is no surer way to get a human to open something than to print "DO NOT OPEN UNDER PAIN OF DEATH" on the side of it. We humans reserve that sort of language for the really good stuff, treasure and weapons and our private diaries. If we ever imprison a race of immortal, incorporeal, homicidal alien parasites, we will print on the side of the container "BRASS COGS Part No. 3705-B CHECK YEARLY," and everyone will float by, whistling and looking the other way and glad that cog storage and maintenance is some other fool's problem.

So of course the first Terran explorers had docked with the satellite immediately; or rather, finding no dock, had vacuumed on to the satellite and chopped a hole in it, expecting to find alien wonders beyond measure. Instead there were Kel, and the explorers had all died horribly--the Kel had been very angry by that point, and probably insane, and several thousand years worth of hungry. They couldn't go through the vacuum of space unprotected any better than we could. So they'd taken the human ship, cleansed of its optimistic and greedy overseers, and pulled themselves together enough to crash back onto their home world. But they had still been hungry and angry and insane, and all their civilization was thousands of years gone, and nature had taken their planet over again. So they stayed on the ship, living in nearly the exact same manner they had lived in their satellite prison, because it had been thousands of years since they had known anything else, and at least this time they had chosen it. This lasted for another fifty years, until the humans sent another ship.