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Little blue ball of dirt and mostly water, in a corner of a small galaxy at the ass end of the universe. Five billion years it spun around in space, and then we managed to fill it up with a hundred billion of our species in just fifty millennia. Spoiled water, lousy air, mostly dead oceans. And what we didn’t ruin, we fought over incessantly, killing each other by the millions over the centuries as our technology far outpaced our ability to keep the vestigial lizard parts of our brains in check.
“Don’t worry, my man,” he says, in what sounds like a mock American surfer-dude accent. “Russian soldiers are trained professionals.”
“You’ve never had anything like that in your life, Andrew. Proper single malt Scotch, from actual Scotland. Not made from soy or recycled piss or whatever. Aged in a fucking wood barrel for fourteen years, then sat on a shelf in some middle-class asshole’s private stash for a few more. So simple and clean, and so complex at the same time. All that work and time, just for someone to sip slowly and enjoy. Pure decadence.”
At this distance, I can make out details on the Lanky ship I’ve never seen before—elongated bumps, irregular patterns of texture that almost look like bark or wrinkles on wet skin. I know it’s a ship—I’ve seen plenty of recon footage of them deploying seedpods by the hundreds onto colony worlds—but it’s not the first time that I find myself thinking it looks like a living, sentient thing.
They don’t have hull numbers like we do, of course. But once you’re close enough for optical gear, you can tell them apart. A mark here, a bump there. Ripple in the skin. That sort of thing.” He takes another sip of his coffee. “Ours all look the same ’cause they all came out of the same fleet yard. Built to the same set of blueprints. These guys? They don’t look like they’ve been built at all.” “They don’t look uniform enough,” I say. “Right. Cheery thought, huh? Maybe there’s an even bigger mother ship pumping these things out somewhere. Like a whale birthing a calf.”
Same way whales are identified.
“Boo,” Dmitry says. He cracks a smile in my direction, and I can’t help but return it. The man is nominally my enemy, and two months ago we may have faced each other on the battlefield, but I like him. I also think he may be just a little bit nuts, or maybe I’m just not used to Russian attitudes yet.
The futility of war, young men and women ordered from above to kill each other for stupid reasons, and all that. But I don’t feel ennobled or enlightened by any of this. Mostly, I just feel like I’ve wasted most of the last five years of my life killing people who didn’t need or want to be killed, as part of a big stupid machine that has been chewing up the very assets we needed to fight the Lankies, the real threat.
several square meters of hull plating around the open tubes are torn and buckled from the sudden high-velocity passage of the Lanky penetrators. Such a simple weapon, and so effective against a species that needs to ride in air-filled shells to survive out in space.
In a hundred years, those marks left by the armor-piercing grenades from the Shrikes will still be in that wall, long after everyone who has fought in this battle is dead and forgotten, and nobody knows about the little skirmish that took place here, a minor footnote in a very short chapter of colonial history.
The Lanky wails and pulls its head back, away from the gunfire. Then it lurches forward and rams its cranial shield into the hallway opening again. There’s a tortured groaning sound from overhead, and an avalanche of debris crashes down between us and the Lanky. I cover my head as the hallway turns completely dark.
Lanky realizes humans are sentient
