“Our species will be dead.”
“Yes. Exterminated. Our military are very good at their jobs.”
“You will have killed us,” Gram said, “destroyed the culture that we have built for thousands of years, and you won’t even give it any thought. Your species doesn’t think about what it does any more. It just acts, like a single-celled animal, engulfing everything it can reach. You say that you are a conscious species, but that isn’t true. Your every action is... instinct. Or reflex.”
“I don’t understand,” said Drill.
Gram’s body trembled. “That is the tragedy of it,” she said.
*
An hour later Ship rose from the field. Shars laughed their defiance from below, dancing in crazed abandon.
I have failed Drill told Memory.
You knew the odds were long, Memory said. You knew that in negotiations with species this backward there have only been a handful of successes, and hundreds of failures.
Yes, Drill acknowledged. It’s a shame, though. To have spent all these months away from home.
Eat! Eat! said Lowbrain.
Far away, in their forty-mile-long Ships, the human soldiers were already on their way.
THE END
Dinosaurs Page 4