The Universe's Mixer

The City had spent time studying its foe. Worrying about the people that it had lost and trying to come up with a way to rescue them. The more time that went by, the more urgent the matter became. Some of them might have been replaceable, but it didn't want to do that to even those few. The place it was seeing, this planet, was not a place it was willing to lose to. It was broken down, not advanced, empty of true life. When the City let go of people, it always sent them back to where they had come from, and it refused to drop them into a place they would not be at home in.

Not finding a way to fight the planet without hurting its own people, The City devised another tactic. it spent a few days perfecting the idea, and doing some more studying. It didn't want to be rash and it didn't want to hurt anybody that it was bringing in. It did want to hurt the planet, though.

With the final decision made, the City acted. It reached out to the planet below and picked out those who it knew belonged to it. That's not where things stopped, though. The City also plucked out some of its own hostages. People who obviously belonged to the planet. The City would do them no harm, but it wanted some sense of security while it tried to figure out how to make sure this planet never did this to it again. The best way to do that was to have some people that it surely cared about. It wouldn't attack with hostages taken, would it?

Not taking care with its actions, the City ripped the people back to itself all at once.