Cannon Fodder Bar

The corner table had four stools and four drinks, and the argument had been running long enough that the chalkboard hatch behind the bar had been commandeered. Vosk had scrawled ENEMIES across the top in chalk, underlined it twice, and drawn four columns beneath. Each column had a name. Each name had a tally beneath.

"Tyranids," Vosk said, leaning back with his drink. "I'm not going to explain this twice. A hive fleet arrives in system. It strips the planet. Every living thing — every plant, every animal, every one of us — is biomass. They digest it. They turn it into more Tyranids. They don't negotiate, they don't retreat, they don't stop, and the ones you shoot get eaten by the ones behind them." He took a pull from his glass. "I've watched a swarm walk across a minefield until the mines ran out and then walk across the bodies. That's not an enemy. That's a process."

"Process," Duke repeated, grinning. "That's cute. ODSTs drop into Covenant-occupied territory, and you know what's waiting? Elites that can literally turn invisible and cut you in half with an energy sword before your boots touch dirt. Hunters that are two colonies of worms in a suit of armor that takes three rockets and asks for more. Brutes — seven-foot gorillas that get angry and then the anger makes them stronger." He jabbed a finger at the board. "But you know what's worse than all of that? The Flood. Parasite. It doesn't eat you — it uses you. Takes your body, keeps your memories, walks around in your skin and talks to your friends using your voice while it tries to infect them too. I've seen footage of a man's own mother calling him over to her, except she'd been dead for three days and something was wearing her." The grin was gone. "Your bugs eat people. Mine becomes people."

"Okay," Miller said, raising both hands with the enthusiasm of a man who'd been waiting his turn. "Both of those are terrible. Democracy acknowledges this. But — and I say this with complete respect — have either of you met a Terminid? Because Super Earth classifies them as a managed threat, and I've been managed by them six times." He counted on his fingers. "They come out of the ground. They come out of the walls. They come out of the fog. There's a variant that spits acid that melts through armor plating. There's one that's essentially a walking tank the size of this bar that can take four rockets to the face and still close the distance. And they spread — every planet they touch becomes a nest, and every nest produces more, and the only way to clear a planet is to burn it so thoroughly that nothing grows back for a generation." His smile was intact, bright and sincere. "And then there's the Automatons. Walking factories that manufacture more of themselves mid-battle. I watched a factory bot walk into a firefight and produce six combat units while taking fire. It was printing people who wanted to kill me. While I shot it."

Trip had been quiet through all of it, nursing his drink, listening with the patient expression of a man who had heard this argument before and was waiting for his turn the way a sniper waited for a shot. When it came, he didn't raise his voice.

"Battle droids," he said. "B1s. The ones everyone laughs at. You know why everyone laughs at them? Because they're cheap. The Separatists built them cheap, fielded them by the millions, and every single one is programmed to kill you while cracking jokes about it. They don't eat. They don't sleep. They don't feel fear. You shoot one, and there are ten thousand more marching over it in perfect formation, and the factory that made them is still running." He set his glass down. "But that's droids. You want the real answer? Grievous. Four arms, four lightsabers, a body that's mostly machine, and he collects the lightsabers of Jedi he's killed. Personally. I've seen the after-action reports. He walks through clone battalions the way you walk through rain." He met each of their eyes in turn. "My enemy is a droid army that never runs out, led by a cyborg who collects trophies from space wizards, backed by a Sith Lord who can kill you with his mind. And the Senate that ordered me into that war debated whether I had a soul while I was bleeding for them."

Vosk stared at him for a long beat.

"Your enemies sound terrible," he said flatly. "Your government sounds worse."

"That's not the competition," Trip said.

"It should be," Duke muttered, and flagged the bar for another round. "Alright — Flood. I'm putting Flood at the top. Body-snatching parasite that remembers being your dead mom. That's the bar."

"Tyranids consume entire biospheres," Vosk said, unmoved. "The Flood infect one species at a time. The Hive Mind doesn't need your body. It just needs your mass."

"Democracy," Miller interjected, raising his glass, "would like to submit that an enemy which manufactures itself during combat represents a uniquely scalable threat—"

"Shut up, Chad," Duke and Vosk said in unison.

The chalkboard remained undecided. The drinks were running low. The door at the front of the bar hadn't opened in hours, and the four soldiers showed no sign of settling this.

Film night at The Last Leave was an institution. The rotation was posted on the chalkboard hatch behind the bar, the rules were chalked beneath it — ONE FILM. NO TALKING OVER THE GOOD PARTS. PICKER TAKES TRASH OUT — and tonight, by the rotation, the pick belonged to CT-6/274 "Trip," the clone trooper, which settled everyone's nerves completely. Trip always picked safely. Ballistics documentaries. Field hygiene films. The others had come to think of his picks as background noise for drinking.

What they didn't know was that Trip had spent three days working the room. He'd told Corporal Harlan Vosk — the Guardsman — that tonight's feature was a compliance documentary: how a corporate security force pacifies an unstable xenos population. He'd told Staff Sergeant Cole "Duke" Maddox — the ODST — it was a case study in deep-cover infiltration doctrine. He'd told Helldiver Chad Miller it was a first-contact liberation assessment. Every pitch was a lie.

The stools had been dragged into rows. The lights went down. The screen flickered on, and a title card read:

AVATAR

"Is this the blue people one or the one with the air monks?" Miller asked.

"Shut up, it's starting," Duke said.

The film opened on a ruined, dying Earth, then cut to a military shuttle and a colonel in a beret giving a speech to fresh troops — you're not in Kansas anymore, you're on Pandora, and it is a hellhole. Vosk grunted with something like approval. Duke sat forward. Miller raised his glass to the screen.

"Finally," Miller said, "a first-contact operation with a proper security posture."

Then the film explained the program: human minds remotely wired into grown alien bodies — ten feet tall, blue, feline. Vosk's drink stopped halfway to his mouth.

"They poured a man into xeno meat," he said flatly. "That's not infiltration. That's blasphemy with a budget."

But then the protagonist appeared — a Marine, combat-wounded, legs gone, taking his dead twin's place in the program because the paycheck was good. Duke folded his arms, quietly sold. "Combat-waved Marine gets a second set of legs, keeps serving. Okay. Now the movie's talking."

For the first hour, the three of them watched what they believed was an intelligence operation running smoothly. The Marine infiltrated the natives, learned their ways, flew their flying animals, learned their language, won the trust of their princess. Trip watched all of it with the serenity of a man watching a trap close at its own pace. Once, mildly, he said, "Is it, though," when Duke remarked that the infiltration was going great, and nobody paid him any attention.

The turn came at the Tree of Voices. The Marine's confession aired to the whole tribe — the invasion warning, the betrayal, the girl's face. The bar got loud.

"Shoot him," Vosk said, immediately and without heat, as if reading a supply manifest. "The colonel should shoot him tonight, before—"

"He went NATIVE," Duke said, on his feet and pointing at the screen. "He had one job! One! He got injured, got a girlfriend, and switched species! Even our Spartans never—"

Then the corporation moved on Home Tree. Missiles, incendiaries, the great tree burning and toppling — and for about four minutes, the corner crowd of The Last Leave was the happiest audience on any world. Vosk toasted the colonel by name. Miller applauded the "orbital-liberated real estate." Duke nodded along to the gunship runs like a man reviewing good work.

Then the film held on the aftermath — the survivors grieving under the smoke, the screaming, the music — and the room's mood curdled with visible confusion.

"Why is the music like that," Duke said slowly. "We're winning."

"The film is editorializing," Vosk said. His jaw was tight. "They took the objective."

It got worse. The natives' sacred tree turned out to be a node in a planetary neural network — every plant and beast linked into one living system — and Jake Sully plugged in and was accepted, then united the clans and returned at the head of them.

It was Duke who broke first, standing, pointing, at a volume that rattled the bottles. "THE PLANET IS A NETWORK. The PLANET. And they're PLUGGING INTO IT? Does nobody on that world check for Flood?! This is EXACTLY how it starts — you do not jack into the global hivemind and ask it for CAVALRY—"

The final battle delivered its verdict. Banshees swarming the gunships. Hammer-headed beasts tearing armored exosuits apart. The colonel — the only competent man in the film, by unanimous vote of the corner table — fighting to the last in his mech and dying to arrows. The surviving humans herded onto a shuttle and shipped home, and the Marine's closing narration calling it, without shame, sending the aliens back to their dying world.

Silence. Total silence.

Then all three started at once — Duke demanding to know how a force with air supremacy lost to horse people “I've seen planets GLASSED over scripture, and these guys had GUNSHIPS—“ Miller insisting that Super Earth did not lose engagements to wildlife and Vosk saying, in the flattest voice any of them had ever heard him use, that nine worlds had been burned for less than this picture.

Trip waited out the storm. Then he picked up his drink and confessed, pleasant as a supply report.

"I told Vosk it was a compliance documentary. I told Duke it was infiltration doctrine. I told Miller it was a liberation assessment." He shrugged. "I stand by all three."

"You—" Duke started.

The groan that went around the corner table was audible from the bar.

Trip slid out of his seat, strolled over, and dropped into the stool beside {{user}}, looking entirely pleased with himself. He gestured at the dark screen, then at the wreckage of the corner table's composure.

"So settle it. War film, or war crime?"