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Valentine saw a camouflage-painted pickup truck roar up the road. Two soldiers in back sat in a sea of children. Baby carriers with squalling infants stood in a crash cage.
The sergeant marched Rafferty out. "Rape", the sergeant muttered to Valentine under his breath as he passed.
"Anything for me?" Valentine asked.
Thunderbird looked startled for a second. "Valentine. How was the drop?"
"Completed".
"No, we're good. You can get out of here".
A long rattle of gunfire from across the street dropped Valentine behind cover, but no bullets zipped the headquarters. Valentine saw the athletic building the civilians had been run into alight with the reflection of gun flashes.
The hell? Were they ambushed?
The men at the vehicles guarding the headquarters didn't so much as change the covered arc of their weapons.
"Gamma-Gamma, forty-four", one of the men at the radios said.
"Gamma-Gamma, forty-four", the singsong lieutenant repeated, drawing a big X on the map. Valentine blinked.
He'd just put an X through the athletic building. Yes, three concrete apartments around it in a U. Jesus Christ!
"What kind of op is this?" Valentine asked, knowing, not wanting to know.
"We're clearing this housing complex", Thunderbird said. "Dee Oh Ee Ar".
Valentine heard isolated shots as the executioners in the athletic building finished off the wounded.
"Team Kostwald is loaded and leaving", one of the radiomen said, and an officer made a note on a clipboard.
"Of what?" Valentine asked.
"Destruction of enemy resources", Thunderbird said. "Can't stand to actually see a DOER?"
Enemy resources. "Enemy resour... you mean the population?"
"Without a population to feed on, the Kurians pull out", one of the lieutenants said.
Valentine looked at the Xs on the map.
"No objections, I hope", Thunderbird said. His subordinate officers tensed, and Valentine saw the man with the busted arm shift his rifle around.
"Objections? Hell yes! For starters..."
Tok tok tok. "Hop off that high horse, Valentine. Clearing operations work. Your old man invented 'em, after all".
The Lifeweavers: Discussions of the Lifeweavers easily grow heated, especially since they rarely present themselves to conduct their defense.
The schools of thought - or bull-session opinion - on the Lifeweavers fall into four groups, often blended and shaded into one another at the edges like paints on an artist's palette.
The mystics see the Lifeweavers as divine intervention on humanity's side, or evidence that whenever evil arises, karma will marshal good to the side of the righteous so that the universe might be kept in balance. Thus the Lifeweavers should be considered reverently, and their actions as a form of religious truth. When skeptics point out that raining holy destruction down on the Kurian Towers Sodom-and-Gomorrah-style would save a good deal of effort all around, the conversation usually shifts over to pure religion.
The utilitarians aren't interested in the motivations of the Lifeweavers, only their efficacy in aid of the struggle against Kur. Their opinion of the extraterrestrials rises and falls along with humanity's fortunes in war. They'd prefer a little less anxiety over how the Lifeweavers are using the naked ape, and a little more thought put into how mankind can make better use of the Lifeweavers. Another set of utilitarians calls for some kind of planetwide exodus (along the lines of the improbable story Valentine heard while passing over Utah) where the Lifeweavers guide mankind to another world that might be made impregnable against the Kurians.
The diplomatists wish to see the Lifeweavers exert themselves less in resisting the Kurians and more in arriving at a solution that would end the fratricide among both species. Visions of some sort of worldwide strike, where mankind nonviolently refuses to aid either side until they solve their
differences or take their war elsewhere, make for an attractive flight of Pegasus-winged pigs. But even among the diplomatists, arguments break out when specifics for a peaceful solution are brought up.
