Lines of Departure (Frontlines, #2)

by Marko Kloos

When the grunts bump into a minor problem, they use their rifles and rockets. For bigger problems, they lob half-kiloton nukes. For really big problems, they call on me, and I direct in a wing of Shrikes loaded with ordnance, or an orbital fifty-megaton strike that will turn an entire Lanky settlement into a few hundred square

miles of abstract art rendered in glowing slag.

To top off the futility, we’re not even here to take the place back from the Lankies, because we can’t. Instead, we’re just going to ruin the place for both species, because showing the Lankies that we’re willing to write off the planet altogether rather than letting them have it may discourage them from taking any more of our colonies. It’s a desperate, insane, typically human strategy, but it’s the only option we have right now other than rolling over. We’ve met our first competitors in the interstellar struggle for resources, and they are sweeping us out of the way without breaking a sweat.

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.

Here we are, on the losing end of an interstellar war, with our world slowly falling apart around us, and I’m excited about going to see my girlfriend for a day or two. We may have gone from oar-powered galleys to half-kilometer starships in the span of two thousand years, but some things about humanity seem to be a universal constant, no matter the era.

Five years of sweating, fighting, and bleeding, with billions of kilometers traveled and over a hundred colony planets visited, and the only thing I have to show for it is a collection of colorful ribbons on my Class A smock and an abstract number in a bank account somewhere in a government computer. If I die in battle next month, there will be no evidence that I ever existed.

Farewell, NACS Intrepid CV-1941. May you die of old age in the decommissioning docks thirty years from now.

i am similarly sentimental

I want to disagree with Mom, but part of me concurs that a Lanky invasion of Earth would be a mercy killing of our species. We’ve spent most of our history trying to exterminate each other anyway. This way, we’ll at least have some dispassionate outside referee settling all of humanity’s old scores permanently. No more generational feuds, no more ancient grudges, no more pointless revenge carried out against people who inherited some old guilt from their great-grandparents. We will all just go down the path on which we’ve sent so many species ourselves, and we’ll just be a note in someone else’s xenobiology textbooks, listed under the header “EXTINCT.”

Sergeant Fallon shakes her head with a disbelieving grin and looks at me. “Did he just threaten to shoot nukes at one of our own ships?” “He did,” I confirm. “But he does have a history of that.”

“I think I love that man. I want to meet him.”

“Their hulls may be so tough you can’t crack them with shipboard weapons, but those creatures are living, organic beings. They can’t be immune to physics. I guarantee that if we hit one of those seed ships hard enough, it’ll kill every living thing inside.”