Chapter 27

Dear Willow,

Ah if we could feed all the lawyers to the Sa'arm we could hope that it would give them indigestion and discourage them both from trying to consume the human race. I've often thought that lawyers are proof positive of the devil. No other being could take so much pleasure in tormenting another of his own kind. At least cats mostly only torment mice...

There are two things I'm thinking of when I think of sending in roaches and rats. First rats are a disease vector for humans. While we haven't found any diseases that affect the Sa'arm it seems to me to be a good bet that if such diseases exist that rats would be a reasonable vector for it as well. Also rats love to gnaw on everything. Part of that is their nature ... They must gnaw in order to keep their teeth worn down. They also taste everything to see if it is good to eat. I can just imagine having them hide in the small spaces of a Sa'arm warren would be apt to cause the Sa'arm to tear down their own houses (so to speak) in order to get at the vermin.

Roaches are of course even smaller than rats and while they don't vector disease so much they can spoil food and they eat anything that is made of any organic material. That and the fact that they are essentially born pregnant makes them the perfect foil for the Sa'arm. Again given the way the Sa'arm seem to behave having something like roaches in whatever electronics they use causing the proverbial 'bug' would at minimum bollix some of their ability to conquer new planets.

I suppose that I should stay off of lawyers, Marissa has informed me that they are in part the reason that we have grain aboard the Dawn Princess. The other reason, I think I mentioned, is that the Dawn Princess is probably the last Aurora to make a scheduled pickup run. From now on the DECO will be using cube ships to transport colonists. Ok it will take a while to get up to enough of them to have one leaving every month or less so we will still be running Kilos and Auroras and any other ship that we can with evacuees. But having a cube ship with space for 250,000 colonists in orbit allowed us to win the argument with the AI that we should use one pod (about the same size as a railroad box car in cubic measure anyway) to transport goods that many of the various colonies on our route have been asking to have transported in bulk. Seed grain was given a priority but Marissa made sure that we got a nice selection of vegetable seed so that if there is any space available at all we'll plant a garden and have at least those. For the time being I'll probably have to program some sort of micro drones to act as pollinators for them as no one that I know of has begun transporting bee hives.