The tallest of whom is no more than one inch tall.
The Covandu are not so stupid as to launch their tiny little armies against humans sixty or seventy times their size, of course. First they hit us with aircraft, long-range mortars, tanks and other military equipment that might actually do some damage—and did; it's not easy to take out a twenty-centimeter-long aircraft flying at several hundred klicks an hour. But you do what you can to make it difficult to use these options (we did this by landing in Cova Banda's main city's park, so any artillery that missed us hit their own people) and anyway, eventually you'll dispose of most of these annoyances. Our people used more care destroying Covandu forces than they typically might, not only because they're smaller and require more attention to hit. There's also the matter that no one wants to have been killed by a one-inch opponent.
Eventually, however, you shoot down all the aircraft and take out all the tanks, and then you have to deal with the individual Covandu themselves. So here's how you fight one: You step on him. You just bring your foot down, apply pressure and it's done. As you're doing this, the Covandu is firing his weapon at you and screaming at the top of his tiny little lungs, a squeak that you may just be able to hear. But it's useless. Your suit, designed to apply brakes on a human-scale high-powered projectile, barely registers the bits of matter flung at your toes by a Covandu; you barely register the crunch of the little being you've stomped. You spot another one, you do it again.
We did this for hours as we waded through Cova Banda's main city, stopping every now and then to sight a rocket on a skyscraper five or six meters high and take it down with a single shot. Some of our platoon would spray a shotgun blast into a building instead, letting the individual shot, each big enough to take a Covandu's head clean off, rattle through the building like mad pachinko balls. But mostly, it was about the stomping. Godzilla, the famous Japanese monster, who had been undergoing his umpteenth revival as I left the Earth, would have felt right at home.
I don't remember exactly when it was I began to cry and kick skyscrapers, but I had done it long enough and hard enough that when Alan was finally called over to retrieve me, Asshole was informing me that I had managed to break three toes. Alan walked me back to the city park we'd landed in and had me sit down; as soon as I did, some Covandu emerged from behind a boulder and aimed his weapon at my face. It felt like tiny grains of sand were plunking into my cheek.
"God damn it," I said, grabbed the Covandu like a ball bearing, and angrily flung him into a nearby skyscraper. He zoomed off, spinning in a flat arc, decelerated with a tinny thunk when he hit the building, and fell the two remaining meters to the ground. Any other Covandu in the area apparently decided against assassination attempts.
I turned to Alan. "Don't you have a squad to pay attention to?" I asked. He'd been promoted after his squad leader had had his face torn off by an angry Gindalian.
"I could ask you the same question," he said, and then shrugged. "They're fine. They have their orders and there's no real opposition anymore. It's clean and sweep, and Tipton can handle the squad for that. Keyes told me to come hose you down and find out what the hell is wrong with you. So what the hell is wrong with you?"
"Christ, Alan," I said. "I've just spent three hours stepping on intelligent beings like they were fucking bugs, that's what's wrong with me. I'm stomping people to death with my fucking feet. This"—I swept out an arm—"it's just totally fucking ridiculous, Alan. These people are one inch tall. It's like Gulliver beating the shit out of the Lilliputians."
"We don't get to choose our battles, John," Alan said.
"How does this battle make you feel?" I asked.
"It bothers me a little," Alan said. "It's not a stand-up fight at all; we're just blowing these people to hell. On the other hand, the worst casualty I have in my squad is a burst eardrum. That's a miracle for you right there. So overall I feel pretty good about it. And the Covandu aren't entirely helpless. The overall scoreboard between us and them is pretty much tied."
This was surprisingly true. The Covandu's size worked to their advantage in space battles; their ships are hard for ours to track and their tiny fighter craft do little damage individually but an immense amount in aggregate. It was only when it came to ground fights that we had the overwhelming advantage. Cova Banda had a relatively small space fleet protecting it; it was one of the reasons the CDF decided to try to take it back.
"I'm not talking about who's ahead in the overall tally, Alan," I said. "I'm talking about the fact that our opponents are one fucking inch tall. Before this, we were fighting spiders. Before that, we were fighting goddamned pterodactyls. It's all messing with my sense of scale. It's messing with my sense of me. I don't feel human anymore, Alan."
"Technically speaking, you're not human anymore," Alan said. It was an attempt to lighten my mood.
It didn't work. "Well, then, I don't feel connected with what it was to be human anymore," I said. "Our job is to go meet strange new people and cultures, and kill the sons of bitches as quickly as we possibly can. We know only what we need to know about these people in order to fight with them. They don't exist to be anything other than an enemy, as far as we know. Except for the fact that they're smart about fighting back, we might as well be fighting animals."
"That makes it easier for most of us," Alan said. "If you don't identify with a spider, you don't feel as bad about killing one, even a big, smart one. Maybe especially a big, smart one."
"Maybe that's what's bothering me," I said. "There's no sense of consequence. I just took a living, thinking thing and hurled it into the side of a building. Doing it didn't bother me at all. The fact that it didn't does bother me, Alan. There ought to be consequences to our actions. We have to acknowledge at least some of the horror of what we do, whether we're doing it for good reasons or not. I have no horror about what I'm doing. I'm scared of that. I'm scared of what it means. I'm stomping around this city like a goddamned monster. And I'm beginning to think that's exactly what I am. What I've become. I'm a monster. You're a monster. We're all fucking inhuman monsters, and we don't see a damned thing wrong with it."
Alan didn't have anything to say to that. So instead we watched our soldiers, stomping Covandu to death, until finally there weren't really any left to stomp.
"So what the hell is wrong with him?" Lieutenant Keyes asked Alan, about me, at the end of our post-battle briefing with the other squad leaders.
"He thinks we're all inhuman monsters," Alan said.
"Oh, that," Lieutenant Keyes said, and turned to me. "How long have you been in, Perry?"
"Almost a year," I said.
Lieutenant Keyes nodded. "You're right on schedule, then, Perry. It takes about a year for most people to figure out they've turned into some soulless killing machine with no conscience or morals. Some sooner, some later. Jensen here"—he indicated one of the other squadron leaders—"got to about the fifteen-month point before he cracked. Tell him what you did, Jensen."