The state guard was immobilized by the snow. It would be hours before a UDF platoon could be lifted in by helicopter. By then, half the buildings in town had burnt to the ground and one out of three of the town's fifteen hundred residents had been killed. The mayor, the preacher, and the old man from the general store were among the dead.
Men who had chosen to grow corn rather than join the army died fighting to defend their families. Small arms were no use against Mimics. Bullets only glanced off their bodies. Mimic javelins ripped through the walls of wooden and even brick houses with ease.
In the end, a ragged bunch of townspeople defeated the three Mimics with their bare hands. They waited until the Mimics were about to fire before rushing them, knocking the creatures into each others' javelins. They killed two of the Mimics this way, and drove off the third.
Dying, Rita's mother sheltered her daughter in her arms. Rita watched in the snow as her father fought and was killed. Smoke spiraled up from the flames. Brilliant cinders flitted up into the night. The sky glowed blood red.
From beneath her mother's body, already beginning to grow cold, Rita considered. Her mother, a devout Christian, had told her that pretending to cry was a lie, and that if she lied, when God judged her immortal soul she wouldn't be allowed into Heaven. When her mother told Rita that if Mimics didn't lie they could get into Heaven, the girl had grown angry. Mimics weren't even from Earth. They didn't have souls, did they? If they did, and they really did go to Heaven, Rita wondered whether people and Mimics would fight up there. Maybe that's what awaited her parents.
The government sent Rita to live with some distant relatives. She stole a passport from a refugee three years older than she who lived in a run—down apartment next door and headed for the UDF recruiting office.
All over the country, people were getting tired of the war. The UDF needed all the soldiers they could get for the front lines.
Provided the applicant hadn't committed a particularly heinous crime, the army wouldn't turn anyone away. Legally, Rita wasn't old enough to enlist, but the recruiting officer barely even glanced at her purloined passport before handing her a contract.
The army granted people one last day to back out of enlistment if they were having second thoughts. Rita, whose last name was now Vrataski, spent her last day on a hard bench outside the UDF office.
Rita didn't have any second thoughts. She only wanted one thing: to kill every last Mimic that had invaded her planet. She knew she could do it. She was her father's daughter.
3
On the next clear night, look up in the direction of the constellation humanity calls Cancer. Between the pincers of the right claw of that giant crab in the sky sits a faint star. No matter how hard you stare, you won't see it with the naked eye. It can only be viewed through a telescope with a thirty—meter aperture. Even if you could travel at the speed of light, fast enough to circle the earth seven and a half times in a single second, it would take over forty years to reach that star. Signals from Earth scatter and disperse on their journey across the vast gulf between.
On a planet revolving around this star lived life in greater numbers and diversity than that on Earth. Cultures more advanced than ours rose and flourished, and creatures with intelligence far surpassing that of H. sapiens held dominion. For the purposes of this fairy tale, we'll call them people.
One day, a person on this planet invented a device called an ecoforming bomb. The device could be affixed to the tip of a spacecraft. This spacecraft, far simpler than any similar craft burdened with life and the means to support it, could cross the void of space with relative ease. Upon reaching its destination, the ship's payload would detonate, showering nanobots over the planet's surface.
Immediately upon arrival, the nanobots would begin to reshape the world, transforming any harsh environment into one suitable for colonization by the people who made them. The actual process is far more complicated, but the details are unimportant. The spacecraft ferrying colonists to the new world would arrive after the nanobots had already completed the transformation.
The scholars among these people questioned whether it was ethical to destroy the existing environment of a planet without first examining it. After all, once done, the process could not be undone. It seemed reasonable to conclude that a planet so readily adapted to support life from their own world might also host indigenous life, perhaps even intelligent life, of its own. Was it right, they asked, to steal a world, sight unseen, from its native inhabitants?
The creators of the device argued that their civilization was built on advancements that could not be undone. To expand their territory, they had never shied away from sacrificing lesser life in the past. Forests had been cleared, swamps drained, dams built. There had been countless examples of people destroying habitats and driving species to extinction for their own benefit. If they could do this on their own planet, why should some unknown world in the void of space be treated differently?
The scholars insisted that the ecoforming of a planet which might harbor intelligent life required direct oversight. Their protests were recorded, considered, and ultimately ignored.
There were concerns more pressing than the preservation of whatever life might be unwittingly stomped out by their ecoforming projects. The people had grown too numerous for their own planet, and so they required another to support their burgeoning population. The chosen world's parent star could not be at too great a distance, nor would a binary or flare star suffice. The planet itself would have to maintain an orbit around a G—class star at a distance sufficient for water to exist in liquid form. The one star system that met these criteria was the star we call the sun. They did not worry for long that this one star might be the only one in this corner of the Milky Way that was home to intelligent life like their own. No attempt was made to communicate. The planet was over forty years away at the speed of light, and there was no time to wait eighty years for the chance of a reply.
The spacecraft built on that distant planet eventually reached Earth. It brought with it no members of their species. No weapons of invasion. It was basically nothing more than a construction machine.
When it was detected, the interstellar craft drew the attention of the world. But all Earth's attempts to make contact went unanswered. Then the ship split into eight pieces. Four of the pieces sank deep under the ocean, while three fell on land. The final piece remained in orbit. The pieces that landed in North Africa and Australia were handed over to NATO. Russia and China fought over the piece that landed in Asia, but China came out on top. After much arguing among the nations of Earth, the orbiting mothership was reduced to a small piece of space junk by a volley of missiles.
The crèche machines that came to rest on the ocean floor began carrying out their instructions quietly and methodically. In the depths, the machines chanced upon echinoderms—starfish. The crèche—produced nanobots penetrated the rigid endoskeletons of the starfish and began to multiply in symbiosis with their hosts.
The resulting creatures fed on soil. They ate the world and shat out poison. What passed through their bodies was toxic to life on Earth, but suitable for the people who had sent them. Slowly, the land where the creatures fed died and became desert. The seas where they spread turned a milky green.
At first it was thought that the creatures were the result of mutations caused by chemical runoff, or perhaps some prehistoric life form released by tectonic activity. Some scientists insisted it was a species of evolved salamander, though they had no evidence to support their conclusion. Eventually, these new creatures formed groups and began venturing out of the water. They continued their work to reshape the earth with no regard for the society of man.