Chapter 17

Dear Willow,

I guess you should know that Marissa reads the letters I send, as well as those I receive. I'm saying that to let you know that she says that the Sa'arm will call a tank a target. The reason we haven't had much success with fighting the Sa'arm is that they work as a hive mind. But it is worse than that. If a Sa'arm trooper dies the rest of them know that it died. Then they send out a whole platoon (at least) of troopers to determine what killed the one. That is if the trooper didn't see what killed it! If they know where you were (you cannot hide a tank) then they just call artillery in on you and you get bombarded. If that doesn't work then they start working to undermine your position. That is because the Sa'arm are natural sappers.

I will enjoy my wood working tools, even if I end up framing them as some sort of artwork because wood is going to be a very rare commodity in the diaspora for quite a while. However I accept the gesture in the spirit you intended it. That is I hope you intended to give me something familiar that would remind me of good times at home. For that I sincerely thank you.

I do worry that you think that surface warfare will work at all against the Sa'arm. This is how I see the war proceeding. We've been working to understand how the Sa'arm work (communicate and live) what we know is that we know almost nothing about either of these issues. The Sa'arm appear to bring a large number of troopers to a new (to them world) in a sort of biostasis. Then they set up shop making huge numbers of additional Sa'arm troopers. But we don't know if they hatch from eggs or are ovavivaparous. If you don't know what that big word means it means that they bear live young rather than laying eggs. The main thing we do know about the Sa'arm is that the main body of their 'hive' is underground. We don't know how they communicate, only that it seems to be both instantaneous and lossless. Imagine radio that worked without a bit of static and had no satellite delays to get from one side of the world to the other. Maybe not even wire time delays.

I say all of that in order to lead up to saying that I believe we'll probably spend at least ten years learning how to keep the Sa'arm bottled up on the worlds they already infest. Part of that time of course will be spent on Earth learning how to fight a partial infestation. Once we have thrown them off the Earth (and created a defacto divide in the human race that will be larger than any skin pigment issues we've faced until now) then we will begin to take the fight to other infested worlds that haven't been totally destroyed. Those worlds where the Sa'arm have become the only living creatures we will deny the ability to enter space. That will probably take another hundred years. Of course you'll say I'm being a pessimist. I don't think so. Believing that we will retain Tellus is probably a bit of high hopefulness that many in the Confederacy navy would pooh-pooh. I do not. Humanity beat out tougher predators than the Sa'arm and we will learn to win against them.

Keep well and find out what the end goal is for your training. If anyone is thinking that mobile pill boxes will work much better than fixed ones I think they are foolish. When (and again I think we eventually will) humanity gains the upper hand in the space war then I will be much more copacetic with you fighting them. But not if you think that you can possibly do so on a planet.

One other thing I must make mention of before I sign out is this. If a sponsor refuses to take your kids, that sponsor is not worth having. I say that in the case that somehow you end up being John's guardian without the ability to take him as your own dependant.

Your very concerned brother,

Will