One of the problems we faced in trying to control -- if not turn back -- the expansion of the Sa'arm was the lack of weapons that could kill enough of them to reduce a hive's ability to function. We had learned, quite early on, that shock and awe doesn't go very far when you can only surprise a small minority of the units that make up the gestalt.

I'm a grunt, a GROPO. I could have had more rank, really, given my CAP score, but there was something about being a GROPO that appealed to me. I quickly learned that there was a certain advantage in "honest information" being at the front end. I've seen, usually from the bottom of a food chain, how information gets corrupted on it's trip from the front end (where the customers are) and the hind end (where the executives live).

Even with AIs there is, I've learned, still a bureaucratic mindset in those furthest from the tooth and claw of the organization.

That I was putting off my turn in the role of an REMF was reassuring and I did my best to protect my men from orders dropping from the adminisphere. Any order that did not make enough sense given our situation were usually subject to "interpretation"... and I could thank the AIs for backing up my interpretation once I explained how reality had to trump the thinking -- or lack thereof -- of those above me on the food-chain.

Orders may flow down-hill, just like shit does, but seldom, if ever, does reality flow the other way.

I had already reached the conclusion that body counts were not a useful datum in reports, unlike the REMFs who keep asking for such useless estimates, since the Sa'arm had too many bodies available to throw at any challenge. They also had a much shorter maturation time since any off-spring would be integrated into the gestalt so would not need to be taught anything, giving them an unfair advantage on us humans... and those bodies are no more than ammunition to the Sa'arm gestalt, their collective "mind".

When it came to reproductive potential, especially with multiple concubines expanding the number of wombs allowing extra parallelism, we had as much of an advantage over all of the other races within the Confederacy, but, then, they'd genetically engineered themselves to slow that down.

We humans hadn't had to re-engineer ourselves for limited lebensraum and resources as had all of the other members (assuming we humans qualified as members) of the Confederacy.

If the Sa'arm had an Achille's Heel it was that the gestalt had to supervise so many functions that bordered on what, in a human being, would be considered autonomic. While breathing, eating and shitting are easy for us humans, the gestalt had to cope with being made of units that found those three activities taxing, leaving very little capacity left over for the gestalt to use for "shared thinking".

As a Lieutenant my on-duty activities were fairly straight-forward. It was in my off-duty time that I took advantage of the flatter "information hierarchy" to pursue subjects that aroused my curiosity. One of my activities centered on data mining covering human discoveries, explorations and research.

Fortunately the old "loose lips" warning -- you know, something that drives the whole "need to know" mindset-does not apply in our dealings with the Sa'arm.

One project I ran across had me shivering. I'm not sure I understood how the people in the project could cope with it, themselves, since it centered on "fighting fire with fire". I did not think we humans could be comfortable as part of a collective group mind, like the Borg from one of the Star Trek series. While it would make managing a military unit more "controllable" it has been the exercise of individual initiative that has, in human history at least, often turned the tide of battle. Somehow I did not find this idea comforting.

Most projects I saw were less than exciting.

One discovery that did excite me, on the other had, was made through an odd-ball colony named Ishtar which, as I understood it, had started out as one of those little filling stations in the middle of nowhere, but had accumulated some curious characters over time. They got an extra job once a ship missed their system and ended up "next door", finding an asteroid field with artifacts from an advanced technical civilization.

The small white dwarf star in that system wasn't one that the Sa'arm had a tendency to look at -- they preferred A, F, G and K spectral classes -- and was attracting the curiosity of some folks in the Human end of the Confederacy since this "advanced technology" did seem to exceed what the Confederacy was willing to give us.

One suggestion I dropped into the "suggestion box" was that we needed both archaeologists and paleontologists much like "IPX" from the Babylon-5 series. You can learn a lot about a future by studying the past.

So I kept a finger on the pulse of Ishtar's project -- and the one about giving humans a group mind, if only to know when to worry -- as I continued digging for my own amusement.

I didn't know that one of the fruits of that suggestion would actually apply directly to fighting the Sa'arm though it had been through so many hands there was no credit accrued.

One of the jokes that made the rounds was that Ishtar had copied an "infinite improbability drive" they found and that they demonstrated it as working... more or less. This drive would not make much difference to me or to anyone else, directly. The indirect effects, however, would end up becoming very important to me.

Fast forward approximately two years. I'd long since gotten a bunch of promotions and was still doing my best to not be an REMF, though, as a Major, I was right on the border-line... if not just barely over it.

There I was, standing on a loading dock, wondering about a new weapon system we just got in from Ishtar, consisting of a huge shipping crate with a courier to explain how to use it.

"Well, Major," the woman told me, "this is a new stand-off weapon system. Just drop this near a planet and it'll decelerate and make a soft landing. It will do its best to not land too close to an infestation of Sa'arm in order to give it time for the payload to become active."

I looked up at the crate, over twenty feet tall. "So... what is in it?"

She smiled at me "Help me undo the latches."

It took us a couple of minutes but we soon had the shipping container ready to open. With some tugging-and, in my head, the theme from 2001-we unveiled a large... rabbit-shaped object.

I heard Helen, the courier, chuckle at my expression, which, at that moment, must have looked completely befuddled.

"Look, Major, this... capsule... has the necessary equipment to get it to the surface of a planet, safely, without injuring the occupants. They all travel in stasis and will be released when the pod lands."

Shaking my head I commented "Somehow I don't think any Marine would want to ride in that thing as a drop capsule. Starship Troopers this ain't."

Another smile "No Marines will ride in this" she said, slapping its side. "This is what we have come to call a 'Trojan Rabbit'. It delivers a brood of rabbits that were somehow... evolved... when exposed in a test of the IID, the Infinite Improbability Drive. We now know we can't risk having people ride such a ship, and, to make matters worse, it seems to corrupt data that is carried, so it doesn't make a good message drone. We've got people looking into making it workable, but these bunnies were the result of one of the tests. They are a bit more than they would appear."

She didn't seem taken aback when I stared at her.

"Look, Major... ummm... can I call you Steve?"

I nodded and gave her a smile.

"Steve, we sent a bunch of rabbits through in a test of the drive. It scrambled their DNA and body structure something weird. We now have blood-thirsty man-eating rabbits."

I can't say my stare was any less blank.

She chuckled. "Steve, have you ever seen an ancient movie by the name of 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'?"

I shook my head. It bothered me to be so clueless. "I have heard of Monty Python but didn't 'get it' when I saw a few clips."

Helen nodded, "Not surprising. In any case, it was a comedy... or a satire... or something like that. The movie inspired this drop capsule once we discovered how dangerous these bunnies are. We want to do a test drop to see whether they'll deal with the Sa'arm."

"Sure" I answered, feeling unsure. "Do we even know if they'll attack the Sa'arm?"

Somehow it didn't seem sane given how she giggled. "Yes, that's been tested."

"All, right, then, we'll schedule a drop. How much of a shelf life does this pod have?"

"Major" she answered with a serious mien, "the use of stasis -- well, cryptobiostasis, to be pedantic -- makes the shelf-life indefinite."

I nodded. "We'll see where we can drop them, then" and made a note to myself to watch the movie, tonight, before talking to her again.

All right, so I ended up laughing my ass off... until the man-eating rabbit scene... which left my mouth hanging open, as did the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

So the next meeting had us both chuckling as we worked out which enclave of Sa'arm to set aside for a test of a new weapons system since we had to pull back our marines. These killer bunnies had no IFF and their teeth could cut even Marine battle armor.

Two years later we couldn't visit the planet any more than the Sa'arm could, there were too many of the harmless looking killer bunnies gnawing on vegetation down on the surface and no other large animals were present on the planet.

I'm not sure whether seeding a planet with these bunnies is really preferable to shattering one with an HSIT shell. Can you pronounce Pyrrhic Victory?