Lines of Departure (Frontlines, #2)

by Marko Kloos

All people ever do around here is watch the Networks and bitch about all the stuff they don’t have.

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.”

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 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.