Lines of Departure (Frontlines, #2)

by Marko Kloos

We’re down to sixty-nine colonies,

Nice.

I recall the Book of Exodus, the verses telling of the angel of death passing through Egypt at night and killing all the firstborn children, sparing only the houses with the mark of lamb’s blood on the doorposts. In a way, I am an angel of death as well, but the power I serve is even more vengeful and merciless than the god of Israel. I’m the one who marks the doorposts in the night, and we pass over none.

In truth, warfare has changed very little since our great-great-grandfathers killed each other at places like Gettysburg, the Somme, Normandy, or Baghdad. It’s still mostly about scared men with rifles charging into places defended by other scared men with rifles.

I don’t want to shoot at my fellow soldiers. But the thought of shooting at civilians is even more upsetting. I don’t want to pick a side, but now that I am forced to choose, I know which one I have to join.

“They thought we’d blink first, and we thought they would,” I say. “Looks like we were all wrong.”

I don’t have any love for the Lankies, those strange, planet-stealing, casually genocidal creatures, but in four years of constant combat against them, I’ve never seen two of their kind fight each other.

“Let’s go see the science crew. I want to see if those smart people have any ideas for making the event memorable. If I’m going to die, I want to at least make it into one of those ‘Epic Last Stands in History’ books.”

“Indianapolis and Gordon concur with the crazy option,” he says. “And the Gordon’s skipper says his new boat is a piece of shit anyway, and he hopes it will make a better missile than a freighter.”

“We have a truce with the SRA units in our attendance,” Colonel Aguilar continues. “They are not a belligerent task force. They are refugees. And so are we. The Lankies are in our solar system.”