Free Cooper by Nhys Glover

the planet, subjugating the humans who lived here. But it wasn't as easy as they thought, and after a while they found they could get further with their plans for domination by going underground, becoming the puppet-masters pulling the strings.
    "They're a race of sociopaths who have no empathy, care for nothing or no one but themselves and their own best interests. Not even the good of their own people counts for much. It's all about themselves and their own personal greed, which is insatiable."
    Amy wanted to interrupt and condemn him for his harsh description of the Guild. They were her people, after all. Even if she didn't fit in, she was still one of them. What he said about them, he said about her. And it just wasn't true. She wasn't like that at all.
    Was she?
    But she kept quiet, just as she'd agreed to do. At least she could hear him out before she left. Not that she knew where she'd go with cat eyes and sharp teeth. Not home, that's for sure. But away from this man who spoke so scathingly about her race.
    The story she knew was different from his. Her people had left their doomed world millennia ago and found refuge on earth. But the savage primitives who called this planet home were not open to their advanced technology. It frightened them, and because those savages had superior numbers they succeeded in almost wiping her people out. Only a small group of males remained after the fighting was over, and to continue their species they took human women as their wives.
    For a long time they stayed hidden, cautious of the primitive, violent creatures who were too stupid to see the advances her people could offer them. Over the millennia her people multiplied and then began to spread out, in secret, assimilating with the different tribes around the world, instructing them where they could, so they could become civilized and assist her people to properly make use of all the resources available on the planet.
    But the Guild always knew that someday they’d have to move on and colonise new worlds, so they left all their technology hidden away in caves for that future time.
    The humans were impossible to totally control, because their brains were so inferior and beast-like. At first, all they could handle was primitive farming skills, and then more complex tasks such as mathematics and writing followed slowly. Eventually, they were ready to be given the greater knowledge of her people, and with it they developed the technology that was akin to what the Guild had known in their long-ago past. The Guild could finally start rebuilding their space-crafts in readiness for departure to more favourable worlds.
    Now her people waited patiently for the time of evacuation. It would come in her lifetime, so her father taught her, but she knew no details. Women, especially stupid ones like her, couldn’t be trusted with such knowledge.
    Giving her head a little shake, Amy brought her focus back to Cooper and his story, which was from the human perspective.
    "Some of the humans saw what the Guild were doing and set up their own resistance group thousands of years ago, unknown to the Guild. That group still operates around the world today, just as the Guild continues to control the economics and politics of the world, to our detriment.
    "In the 1980s the Guild decided they wanted an army of their own; an army that would do anything it was told to do; an army of genetically engineered super-soldiers. They used an embryo that was the result of cross-species DNA experimentation and gestated a hundred cloned babies in test tubes from it. In that super-cocktail of ingredients they included panther DNA.
    "What they didn't know was that the Résistance had infiltrated the research facility and controlled many of the experiments. When the babies had grown to full term, the Résistance blew the whistle on the whole project. The Guild sent out a Termination Order and thought that it had been carried out. Instead, the babies were secreted out of