Dirt Diggers

 

I hate killing dirt diggers – especially these four-foot, leather-skinned descendents of toads from the Chabora star system – because they are all too stupid to understand why we are killing them.

The Royal Family really doesn’t have a program for handling alien races so when we want to take over a system to claim mineral rights or a strategic location, we must move in and kill everything that moves.

Most of the time we’re making room for human colonists to relieve overcrowding on already colonized planets.

Human kind is the only intelligent race that doesn’t know when to stop reproducing, popping out kids until a planet can’t contain them.

So we need to make room  for them elsewhere.

In this case, the Chabora system is next.

Admiral Creetly once said that any race that refused to fight for its own perseveration deserves to die.

Yet watching these bodies mount makes even a hardened Marine like me a little since.

Just once I wish one of them would life a tentacle and fight back.

But they never do.

The Chabora system is really a cluster of three stars with one habitable planet in the group of planets around each start.

The population does travel between planets, bit since they don’t have hyper drive it takes a generation for them to do so and once they get to the next planet they’ve forgotten life exists on the plane they came from and are shocked to find life on the planet on which they just arrived.

So sneaking up on them in ships capable of faster than light speeds is no problem since a race too stupid to remember where it came from can’t warn anyone once its ancestors are gone.

It’s just we keep killing them and they keep letting it happen.

We don’t just bomb them from orbit because we wouldn’t want to hand over a planet full of craters to the incoming human colonists, so we have to go down and shoot them on the ground, rooting them out of every hole so that the colonists won’t have to do it later.

This means piling up bodies.

This means looking them in the eyes.

These means I have to sleep at night thinking of what they must be thinking when I blast them out of existence, and always wondering why they never fight back.

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