Somewhere there is an enemy preparing
to strike. That has been a given throughout the centuries and is
still as true today. Our nation, our planet, our species. Even when
it's no a matter of life and death it's about money, liberty,
happiness, territory, technology or something like that. That is what
the soldiers on UN mandate are taught when they do their take on
training. Most soldiers think that these are fine words. They are
here to fight for humanity after all. Most soldiers start the
training as believers. After a few years most of the believers are
not so sure. Most long service veterans think that these are just
words. Like be the best or be all you can be. Words to make the minds
of men push themselves a little bit further
Still many hundreds of thousands
joined up. There was never any shortage of replacements. Across the
globe soldiers joined their national armies or the UN. The young and
not so young idealists. All looking to save their country or mankind
from forces in the wings waiting to strike. It's what happens to them
in the service that makes them an agnostic when it comes to political
bullshit.
Most keep doing it though. All leave
eventually and mostly by choice. Not because they are believers. True
believers are far from common in this line of work. Society tends to
call them fanatics or psychopaths and sometime things that are far
worse. None of them are born killers. There are screening techniques
to weed them out. Most have a sense of duty and like the thrill and
ways to find it. The thrill of free fall. The thrill of dropping out
of the sky like a meteor. For the soldier there is a certain thrill
to be had from combat. At least when you are winning.
As humanity was quietly going about
it's business on more than two dozen worlds there was something going
on that would make all soldiers and just about everyone else a
believer. Beyond the frontier of human territory an alien race
humanity had yet to encounter was preparing for an attack. This was
not War of the Worlds, not at all. They were out there and they were
coming.
There were four human systems that did
not know what was about to hit them. Well over ten million people who
were living lives that they were about to lose were in blissful
ignorance of this particular trauma on their horizons. Most of the
inhabitants would be grateful that the suffering would be brief. For
most of them they would either be dead or beyond caring about their
problems within a couple of days. In many respects it would be those
that weren't in the first strike area that would suffer the greatest.
It would be the ones who saw what was happening, blow by blow on the
Vid for days. Pearl Harbour, 911, Westminster, Ontario and Adelaide
magnified a thousandfold.
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