The Mercy of Gods (The Captive's War #1)

by James S.A. Corey

You wish to know of our first encounter with the enemy, but it seems more likely to me that there were many first encounters spread across the face of distance and time in ways that simultaneity cannot map.

And in that is our regret. If we had left it alone, nothing that came after would have been as it was. If we had burned it to ash and moved on as we had done to so many other worlds, I would not now be telling you the chronicle of our failure.

Later, when he stood in the eye of a storm that burned a thousand worlds, he’d remember how it all started with Else Yannin’s hand on his arm and his need to give her a reason to keep it there.

“If there isn’t a quieter way, we can always go loud,” Dafyd said. “But once we’ve gone loud, we can’t go quiet.”

The universe tells every being exactly the same implacable truth. The Carryx listen and thrive, where others squirm and express opinions and then are crushed and forgotten.

When a primitive of your own kind cut a branch from a tree and carved the wood into a tool—an axe handle, a tentpole, whatever your will designed—you placed no moral judgment on the act, nor should you have. To do so would have been perverse.

What you did with a tree branch, we did with you and countless others before you. Why me? is not something the universe ever answers.

The elites fled to shelter or dressed in the uniforms that they imagined would look best at the historic moment of contact.

A handful of cities and military bases dissolved in fire. It was no more an attack than a singer clearing her throat was a song. The half-mind announced to the coordinator that it was finished with translation and ready to deliver their message. If the process had been translated into any human tongue, it would have been something like breaking the limb.

“I think some important scientific questions have finally been answered. Alien life exists, and they are assholes.”

“It’s insane,” Jessyn agreed. “Even if they make it out of this room, then what?” “Then they die in a slightly different room?” Campar murmured. “Don’t ignore the siren song of not dying in the same room as the shit-covered mat.”

“We’d have fought anyway,” he said, thinking of Ostencour and his improvised knife. Synnia wrestling down the guard. “It’s what we do.” “I don’t know if that idea is stupid or noble,” Else said. “Human,” Dafyd said. “It’s just human. We don’t stop just because there’s no hope.”

We knew from the moment we knew anything that what can be subjugated, must be. The species that exist long enough to achieve higher orders of intelligence do so only by relentlessly out-competing the other species around them.

“The only test is whether a subject species is useful. Usefulness is survival.”

A leader must be utterly decisive, especially when giving orders that conflict with the ones from the day before.

The slow, low pulse of being alive kept making its demands, no matter what. However bad it was, however mind-breaking and strange and painful, the mundane insisted on its cut.

He wondered, looking back at all the forced labor in the darker corners of history, if some percentage of the victims had always taken pride in their work. He wasn’t sure which answer would be more disturbing.

Jessyn knew the medicine was starting to work when her fantasies changed from suicide to murder.

Whatever it is you’re planning will fail and all of your kind will burn. Go away. We will not burn with you. Go away.

Before, we sang for base reasons. We were in service of nothing, of ourselves. Now we are part of the greatness. We sing the songs of war, and through our singing, spread that which we are.

There was no grabbing at the air. No attempt at surrender. This was life or death. And it wasn’t life.