Pesticide

      After 6 years of sifting through surface terrain samples for the Agency of Planetary Inhabitation, Seth's transfer was finally approved.  He would depart from the space station aboard a brand new ship, the Hope which was a state-of-the-art interstellar scout ship, rigged with the finest telescopic imaging hardware ever built.  Seth is my uncle, or was before the alien pests blew his ship  into peices.  I'm over it now though, we underestimated them once andf it won't happen again, not with this plan.  Our race will not survive another decade on this over-crowded, over-populated planet and we have  run out of patience.  This new planet will be ours or it will be destroyed.  Uncle Seth's flight recorder was replaying the last few moments of his life on my office desk, fueling the burning rage in my gut when I got the call.  It was officer Emins, "Cori, the ships are leaving and I need you at the dispatch center, ok?"  I gratefully agreed and jumped for the control pad to my short range transport.
    On the way to the dispatch center, I thought back to the events preceeding the alien assault.  Uncle Seth had just been transferred and couldn't have been happier.  This new job paid better, was much more exciting, and his orders to patrol outside of known space meant a good chance for him to be in on the big find.  It happened in the summer, right after my birthday.  Uncle Seth called me and told me about "planet H," which was green and blue and had what appeared to be a surviveable atmosphere.  He told me that conditions were ideal except that there were inhabitants that could present a problem for our populations.  He called them "big, destructive beasts with incredible technology but an insatiable appetite for the complete destruction for everything dead or alive."  This scared me of course, considering our race isn't exactly flawless compared to the wildlife we co-exist with.  Seth made contact with the alien species on the last day of his life, when they shot his beautiful scout craft out of the sky.  His wingman, Officer Hin watched mournfully as they salvaged the wreck on the surface of the planet and took my uncle, still twitching, into a compound of some sort.  Uncle Seth was never seen again.  Over the next few decades or so, our civilization massed an army.  From our population of 22 billion, 6 Billion were trained, armed, and on-call for war.  While our military was built, scouts had frequently visited the air-space of the planet, gathering data and testing the reflexes of the enemy.  We know they saw us frequently because we were able to intercept their satellite transmissions.  Our race knew the dangers of wireless communication while theirs did not, so nothing remained hidden from us.
    The new plan had been devised by a man who made less credits per year than my gardner.  He was a pest-control technician named "Kob," a man who became a hero because he accidentally knocked a bottle of forien tree sap into a bucket of X-20 pesticide.  The result was incredible, pesticide that is devastating to species with a certain genetic code, yet harmless to vegetation and all but a few species on our home planet.  At first, the chemical was going to be used defensively, in the event that this vicious species ever land on our surface but this plan was better and it cated to my desire to destroy every one of these murderous aliens.  We would send our largest space transports to the target planet, rigged with dispensors designed to pump our death chemical into their atmosphere.  It was such a beautiful sight that I admittedly shed a few tears as I watched the fleet disembark.  Every transport had at least 2 fighter squadrons in perfect formation. 6 planetary artillery ships were turning toward the alien inhabited planet, and more interstellar transports than I could count were on their tails.  What a war this was going to be!
    The anniversary of Uncle Seth's death was marked for celebration on our new planet.  The invasion was a huge success as we knew it would be.  An estimated 98% of the alien population didn't even survive our chemical assault.  Our planetary artilley ships accurately tore gigantic craters into the surface where their military installations and most populated cities had been, and our invasion force outnumbered their surviving population 40 to 1.  I currently volunteer my free time to hunting down any remaining survivors I can find.  Life is good, here on this planet.  My supervisor even let me keepone of the alien survivors.  I torture my captive in every imaginable way, then I let it heal and start over again.  It talks in a language I now fully understand and tells me all sorts of interesting things that I care nothing about, most likely in an attempt to get be to back off the frequent injections of nerve-seeking nanomachines into it's bloodstream.  It tells me that his brother was located at an installation much like the one they kept the body of my uncle in, an and that the beings of his kind on this particular continent were peaceful, it was all the other continents that were the problem.  I knew this to be untrue but I let it talk when it feels up to doing so.  In a few years I'll kill it and move on but for now I'm content listening to this "human being" ramble on about his "America," family, favorite sports teams and the antics of his race.  It makes me smile that after this long the creature hasn't caught on that I have no system for when I administer my intentionally painful cocktails and always changes the subject when I do so, after a few moments of screaming of course.  Planet "Earth," as they call it could have remained theirs but a species this aggressive is bound to make fatal mistakes, like shooting down my Uncle's scout ship.  I will have to continue this journal on a regular basis, but at the moment my captive seems to be unreasonably comfortable so I shall tend to my regular duties.  "Audio device end session."