Lines of Departure (Frontlines, #2)

by Marko Kloos

Some of the SI troopers think the Lankies look like an evolved version of prehistoric Earth dinosaurs, with their toothless mouths and shield-like protrusions on the backs of their skulls.

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.”

I conclude that I have no regrets, and that I’d do it all again, in exactly the same fashion, if I had the choice. If my life was short, at least I managed to live the last part of it on my own terms.

We turn against our own, we have no fucking reason for existing.”