Lines of Departure (Frontlines, #2)

by Marko Kloos

Lanky towns look a lot like underwater reefs. They don’t build individual houses in tidy rows like we do. Instead, their housing clusters kind of flow together, like vast fields of interconnected starfish. The settlement covering the valley floor below us looks like it grew there naturally. In a way, I almost feel bad for showing the fleet how to destroy it, but then I recall the mission briefing, and remind myself that we lost twelve thousand colonists and a whole reinforced company of Spaceborne Infantry troops when the Lankies came and took the place away from us.

The worst part of an atomic explosion is the blast. Unlike normal explosives, the pressure wave of a nuke goes back and forth, squeezing solid objects like a giant fist. There’s the fireball, of course, which will vaporize anything in its radius at the moment of detonation, but that is a mathematical constant, easily predicted from the yield of the warhead, and short-lived. The shock wave radiates out from the hypocenter of the explosion, bouncing off mountainsides and flattening everything in its way, squeezing structures into piles of rubble and then blowing them apart. It’s the most violent force we can generate at will, but it’s unpredictable, indiscriminate, and easily deflected by a few hundred feet of hillside.

My dad would get a kick out of the fact that my job involves fleet warships firing atomic warheads at a spot in my general vicinity. He’d say that I finally found a line of work that suits my intelligence level.

I do know my Bible, however. 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.

I close the message and turn off my PDP with a smile. 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.

“The whole Eastern Seaboard is like that,” I say. “One metroplex blending into another. We got too many for little old Earth.

I imagine a Lanky seed ship in the sky above, raining down pods of nerve gas onto the city streets below. The Lanky nerve gas acts so quickly that people fall over dead just a few seconds after inhaling a milligram or two, or getting just a microscopic droplet onto their skin. 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.”

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.

They say I have a problem with authority. I say I have a low tolerance for stupid.”

You can choose to follow orders without question, or you can choose to follow the law. Keep in mind that without the law, we’re not a military, just an armed gang that dresses alike.

Humans are hardy, Andrew. They’ll do whatever they can to keep on living, no matter how shitty life gets. Just ask the poor bastards in the welfare clusters back home.”

“I had my prejudices,” she says. “But you’ve managed to put a dent into them. I’m not used to the idea of soldiers being reflective about the ethics of their jobs. I thought you do what they tell you to do.” “Generally. Not always. They don’t surgically remove your sense of right and wrong when you show up for boot camp, you know.”

Physics,” she adds with a slight smile. “Nobody’s immune to physics. I don’t care how big and tough they are.”