Excerpt: The Remnants

“I guess that’s it, then.” She stared at the distant speck, the genocide of the opposing species. The survival of the fittest. For the first time since she was born, she was safe; her side of humanity had won. The other was forever defeated.
“What now?” said Olle.
“You know what? Another war, probably. We can’t go on without one, not for long. Have you been reading the blogs, lately? There’s been a government defector, said something about how various think-tanks recommended maintaining a stalemate with the Hostiles for as long as possible, even if it were possible for us to attain a victory.”
“I see. To keep us in constant fear, to keep us under control.”
“No, I don’t think it’s that malicious,” she said, watching the distant light begin to fade. “The last two decades have been some of the most stable times in human history. No global wars. No petty squabbles. Just a global unification against a common foe.”
“Perhaps.” He pressed his nose up against the glass. “It makes me think, though. We maintained that stalemate for two decades because the Hostile threat was too strong, impossible to defeat until we were ready. Then after the attack, we went straight in and did it. We had all the ships, all the personnel, all the tactics planned out that we needed. What changed?”
“I’m betting it was just the reality of the attack. Command must have got jittery, didn’t want to risk prolonging the statemate, despite the benefits.”
“They picked a divided, warring globe over a divided, warring solar system. That makes sense, actually. Humanity’s been at war on this planet for thousands of years. You know what to expect. We’ve had interplanetary war for all of two decades, and we haven’t got any idea how to fight it. One false move, and it’s not just countries that get eradicated, it’s the entire species. The stakes are too high.”
“Well,” she said, “I can only hope we get used to these new types of war soon enough.”
“Why’s that?”
She pointed, not at the ghostly expanding shell of the distant explosion, but to the stars beyond it, mere pinpricks of light in comparison. “The next one up is interstellar warfare. I don’t know if we can handle that.”
He sighed, turned from the window, collapsed on a seat. “It reminds me, something I once read. When they invented the aeroplane, the first time they used it in war was just for reconnaissance, an extra pair of eyes. No one thought of killing people with it. And when the French pilots met the Japanese pilots over the Eastern Front – or whoever it was fighting – they didn’t shoot at each other, they smiled and waved at each other! Twenty years later, and they’re using the same machine to drop atomic bombs. I think, as a species, we start out with the best of intentions.” He slumped against the wall, eyes closed.