I look back on it every day of my life. That one day that cemented "us" from "them".
A lot of the philosophy and sociology students talk about "rejoining the bulk of humanity," how it would be "better for the species," and "We would be the heroes of mankind."
They are, of course, told it could never work. Shown pictures, video feeds, and statistics of the New Empire's savagery... but they never actually see it. They spend their time in the comforts of home, and never step foot on a ship, or have to seal down a bulkhead that blew out when an enemy MACRO shell hit it in just the wrong way. They never see the body parts, the blood, the horror in the faces of those that survived.
We are shown, of course On our first duty assignment. We need to separate them so we don't get weak knees at the thought of killing thousands of them with each pull of the proverbial trigger. We are taken into enemy territory on scout ships or part of a flotilla of vessels, and are herded into the briefing atrium. We watch on monitors as the Mercury scout ship moves into position to broadcast spy sattelite data from a neighboring system. When the screen patches in, no one ever speaks.
When your in the academy, a lot of debates crop up, things like "they are just as human as we are," and "their lives are a result of an oppressive government and a xenophobic inquisition" are said, and mulled over. Papers are written for classes on the subject every year, with the same tired old arguements. None of these arguments have defended against what I saw that day.
It was a Garden world, a lot like Old Earth in that respect. Blue oceans with blotches of brown and green, wisps of white clouds covering it. The only separating factor was the two moons and the shape of the land masses. Its hard to divert your attention from the beauty of it, because I think we all crave to walk on real land one day.
A sharp eye can see the grey discolorment on the land masses. Cities, huge ones, probably with populations in the tens of millions. Advanced too, from the look of it. It fooled a few other cadets into thinking that this was a new world we could colonize and end our thousands of years long isolation.
Then the camera zooms out, to show two dozen massive vessels, butressed and gothic in lookk and design, a hallmark of The New Empire. The design of the ships is frequently mocked by the younger engineers and scientists, but anyone who has faught against them knows they posess a brutal, and lethal efficiency which makes them immensely dangerous. All of the luxuries we take for granted are stripped out for increased lethality.
One of them, a battleship classified as a Marine Transporter, moves foreward, entering the upper atmosphere, shrugging off the impotent missile defenses of the world as if they were flies on the back of a cow. I could feel the grim anticipation in the room, and as one of the cadets next to me gasped, we watched as six gigantic torpedos launched into the planets lower atmosphere, spawning a light so bright that it nearly whited-out the spy cam. The glowing white dome of the explosion pierced through to the upper atmosphere, and spread... the greens and blues of the world flash changed to black and brown around it.
Like the world, changing from a bastion of life to a dead rock, the atmosphere of the atrium changed from nervous excitement to grim resolution and hatered.
The lessons of our professors just got hammered home. The callous nature of visiting veterans in our classes explained.
I remember once, a particularly firey student once asked a gunnary officer "what he felt" when he killed hundreds of thousands of fellow humans with every ship he destroyed.
Now I know why he shrugged and said "a little buzz as the MAC's charged, and then the recoil. You get a bit of a static charge when you man the beam cannons."
I understood then why "Human" is an insult... and why cadets get in fights with officers in the mess for being called it. After that, no one wants to be even remotely associated with what the rest of our species has become.
We are Terrans. I will never forget that.
