John Scalzi - Old Man's War

"Do you understand now? Do you finally have an idea of what you're up against? Do you?"

But it wasn't all fresh air, exercise, and learning to kill for humanity. Sometimes, we took classes.

"During your physical training, you've been learning to overcome your assumptions and inhibitions regarding your new body's abilities," Lieutenant Oglethorpe said to a lecture hall filled with training battalions 60th through 63rd. "Now we need to do this with your mind. It's time to flush out some deeply held preconceptions and prejudices, some of which you probably aren't even aware you have."

Lieutenant Oglethorpe pressed a button on the podium where he stood. Behind him, two display boards shimmered to life. In the one to the audience's left a nightmare popped up—something black and gnarled, with serrated lobster claws that nestled pornographically inside an orifice so dank you could very nearly smell the stench. Above the shapeless pile of a body, three eyestalks or antennae or whatever perched. Ochre dripped from them. H. P. Lovecraft would have run screaming.

To the right was a vaguely deerlike creature with cunning, almost human hands, and a quizzical face that seemed to speak of peace and wisdom. If you couldn't pet this guy, you could at least learn something about the nature of the universe from him.

Lieutenant Oglethorpe took a pointer and waved it in the direction of the nightmare. "This guy is a member of the Bathunga race. The Bathunga are a deeply pacifistic people; they have a culture that reaches back hundreds of thousands of years, and features an understanding of mathematics that makes our own look like simple addition. They live in the oceans, filtering plankton, and enthusiastically coexist with humans on several worlds. These are good guys, and this guy"—he tapped the board—"is unusually handsome for his species."

He whacked the second board, which held the friendly deer man. "Now, this little fucker is a Salong. Our first official encounter with the Salong happened after we tracked down a rogue colony of humans. People aren't supposed to freelance colonize, and the reason why becomes pretty obvious here. The colonists landed on a planet that was also a colonization target for the Salong; somewhere along the way the Salong decided that humans were good eatin', so they attacked the humans and set up a human meat farm. All the adult human males but a handful were killed, and those that were kept were 'milked' for their sperm. The women were artificially inseminated and their newborns taken, penned and fattened like veal.

"It was years before we found the place. When we did so, the CDF troops razed the Salong colony to the ground and barbecued the Salong colony leader in a cookout. Needless to say we've been fighting the baby-eating sons of bitches ever since.

"You can see where I'm going with this," Oglethorpe said. "Assuming you know the good guys from the bad guys will get you killed. You can't afford anthropomorphic biases when some of the aliens most like us would rather make human hamburgers than peace."

Another time Oglethorpe asked us to guess what the one advantage was that Earth-based soldiers had over CDF soldiers. "It's certainly not physical conditioning or weaponry," he said, "since we're clearly ahead on both those counts. No, the advantage soldiers have on Earth is that they know who their opponents are going to be, and also, within a certain range, how the battle will be conducted—with what sort of troops, types of weapons, and range of goals. Because of this, battle experience in one war or engagement can be directly applicable to another, even if the causes for the war or the goals for the battle are entirely different.

"The CDF has no such advantage. For example, take a recent battle with the Efg." Oglethorpe tapped on one of the displays to reveal a whalelike creature with massive side tentacles that branched into rudimentary hands. "The guys are up to forty meters long and have a technology that allows them to polymerize water. We'd lose water ships when the water around them turned into a quicksand-like sludge that pulled them down, taking their crews with them. How does the experience of fighting one of these guys translate into experience that can be applied to, say, the Finwe,"—the other screen flipped on, revealing a reptilian charmer—"who are small desert dwellers who prefer long-distance biological attacks?

"The answer is that it really can't. And yet CDF soldiers go from one sort of battle to the other all the time. This is one reason why the mortality rate in the CDF is so high—every battle is new, and every combat situation, in the experience of the individual soldier at least, is unique. If there's one thing you bring out of these little chats of ours, it's this: Any ideas you have about how war is waged had better be thrown out the window. Your training here will open your eyes to some of what you'll encounter out there, but remember that as infantry, you'll often be the first point of contact with new hostile races, whose methods and motives are unknown and sometimes unknowable. You have to think fast, and not assume what's worked before will work now. That's a quick way to be dead."

One time, a recruit asked Oglethorpe why CDF soldiers should even care about the colonists or the colonies. "We're having it drilled into our heads that we're not even really human anymore," she said. "And if that's the case, why should we feel any attachment to the colonists? They're only human, after all. Why not breed CDF soldiers as the next step in human evolution and give ourselves a leg up?"

"Don't think you're the first one to ask that question," Oglethorpe said, and this got a general chuckle. "The short answer is that we can't. All the genetic and mechanical fiddling that gets done to CDF soldiers renders them genetically sterile. Because of common genetic material used in the template of each of you, there are far too many lethal recessives to allow any fertilization process to get very far. And there's too much nonhuman material to allow successful crossbreeding with normal humans. CDF soldiers are an amazing bit of engineering, but as an evolutionary path, they're a dead end. This is one reason why none of you should be too smug. You can run a mile in three minutes, but you can't make a baby.

"In a larger sense, however, there's no need. The next step of evolution is already happening. Just like the Earth, most of the colonies are isolated from each other. Nearly all people born on a colony stay there their entire lives. Humans also adapt to their new homes; it's already beginning culturally. Some of the oldest of the colony planets are beginning to show linguistic and cultural drift from their cultures and languages back on Earth. In ten thousand years there will be genetic drift as well. Given enough time, there will be as many different human species as there are colony planets. Diversity is the key to survival.

"Metaphysically, maybe you should feel attached to the colonies because, having been changed yourself, you appreciate the human potential to become something that will survive in the universe. More directly, you should care because the colonies represent the future of the human race, and changed or not, you're still far closer to human than any other intelligent species out there.

"But ultimately, you should care because you're old enough to know that you should. That's one of the reasons the CDF selects old people to become soldiers, you know—it's not just because you're all retired and a drag on the economy. It's also because you've lived long enough to know that there's more to life than your own life. Most of you have raised families and have children and grandchildren and understand the value of doing something beyond your own selfish goals. Even if you never become colonists yourselves, you still recognize that human colonies are good for the human race, and worth fighting for. It's hard to drill that concept into the brain of a nineteen-year-old. But you know from experience. In this universe, experience counts."