All You Need Is Kill

The army granted people one last day to back out of enlistment if they were having second thoughts. Rita, whose last name was now Vrataski, spent her last day on a hard bench outside the UDF office.

Rita didn’t have any second thoughts. She only wanted one thing: to kill every last Mimic that had invaded her planet. She knew she could do it. She was her father’s daughter.

3

On the next clear night, look up in the direction of the constellation humanity calls Cancer. Between the pincers of the right claw of that giant crab in the sky sits a faint star. No matter how hard you stare, you won’t see it with the naked eye. It can only be viewed through a telescope with a thirty-meter aperture. Even if you could travel at the speed of light, fast enough to circle the earth seven and a half times in a single second, it would take over forty years to reach that star. Signals from Earth scatter and disperse on their journey across the vast gulf between.

On a planet revolving around this star lived life in greater numbers and diversity than that on Earth. Cultures more advanced than ours rose and flourished, and creatures with intelligence far surpassing that of H. sapiens held dominion. For the purposes of this fairy tale, we’ll call them people.

One day, a person on this planet invented a device called an ecoforming bomb. The device could be affixed to the tip of a spacecraft. This spacecraft, far simpler than any similar craft burdened with life and the means to support it, could cross the void of space with relative ease. Upon reaching its destination, the ship’s payload would detonate, showering nanobots over the planet’s surface.

Immediately upon arrival, the nanobots would begin to reshape the world, transforming any harsh environment into one suitable for colonization by the people who made them. The actual process is far more complicated, but the details are unimportant. The spacecraft ferrying colonists to the new world would arrive after the nanobots had already completed the transformation.

The scholars among these people questioned whether it was ethical to destroy the existing environment of a planet without first examining it. After all, once done, the process could not be undone. It seemed reasonable to conclude that a planet so readily adapted to support life from their own world might also host indigenous life, perhaps even intelligent life, of its own. Was it right, they asked, to steal a world, sight unseen, from its native inhabitants?

The creators of the device argued that their civilization was built on advancements that could not be undone. To expand their territory, they had never shied away from sacrificing lesser life in the past. Forests had been cleared, swamps drained, dams built. There had been countless examples of people destroying habitats and driving species to extinction for their own benefit. If they could do this on their own planet, why should some unknown world in the void of space be treated differently?

The scholars insisted that the ecoforming of a planet which might harbor intelligent life required direct oversight. Their protests were recorded, considered, and ultimately ignored.

There were concerns more pressing than the preservation of whatever life might be unwittingly stomped out by their ecoforming projects. The people had grown too numerous for their own planet, and so they required another to support their burgeoning population. The chosen world’s parent star could not be at too great a distance, nor would a binary or flare star suffice. The planet itself would have to maintain an orbit around a G-class star at a distance sufficient for water to exist in liquid form. The one star system that met these criteria was the star we call the sun. They did not worry for long that this one star might be the only one in this corner of the Milky Way that was home to intelligent life like their own. No attempt was made to communicate. The planet was over forty years away at the speed of light, and there was no time to wait eighty years for the chance of a reply.

The spacecraft built on that distant planet eventually reached Earth. It brought with it no members of their species. No weapons of invasion. It was basically nothing more than a construction machine.

When it was detected, the interstellar craft drew the attention of the world. But all Earth’s attempts to make contact went unanswered. Then the ship split into eight pieces. Four of the pieces sank deep under the ocean, while three fell on land. The final piece remained in orbit. The pieces that landed in North Africa and Australia were handed over to NATO. Russia and China fought over the piece that landed in Asia, but China came out on top. After much arguing among the nations of Earth, the orbiting mothership was reduced to a small piece of space junk by a volley of missiles.