Realizing you’ve got shit on your fingers is the first step toward washing your hands. - James S. A. Corey

The second I saw those bastards coming down the street, I knew it was over for me. I'm dead. It's just a matter of time is all.
That's always true," Lydia said, her mind taken with other matters. "For everyone.

She had to remind herself that war was always this way. Had always been. Cities had been falling under siege since the time there were cities. Mortars had fallen on schools. Soldiers had stormed hospitals. Bombs had set churches and parks and children on fire. Homes had been lost before now.

But in the thousands of systems where life had solved the complex problem of defying entropy, there were only so many shapes. Sometimes weird shit was going to look familiar. An enemy alien was going to look like a tree or a vulva or a bird because there were too many things and not enough room in design space for all of them. ...
Maybe the wars were about that as much as anything. Who got to keep what shapes. Who got to define what they meant.