Weapons of Mass Destruction

It was the only way,
they told us.
We could contribute to the war effort
or watch our world get destroyed in a battle
between galactic factions we’d never even heard of.

So we let them do it.
We let them do it
to the spinner and the bottlenose,
the haviside and the orca.

Blushing, we told them
about other whales too—
almost extinct, but maybe
they could find a few.
They did.

So we let them do it
to the humpbacks and the blues
and the great sperm whales
with their fearsome teeth.

Just over a year later,
the first babies were born.
In another year they started talking,
puckering their blowhole lips
around English and South Galactic.

We waited nervously
for Earth’s soldiers to grow up
while the war ground onward,
ever closer to our home world.

The calves tried their tender lips
on the harmonichron and the solaria,
the little copper pipes of the popgun
and the great glass pipes of the gravitic organ.
The ocean rang like a bell.
All the wet-navy ships had to be harbored
for safety, lest they get lost or wrecked
by the weapons testing.

The navies complained.
The sperm soldiers just laughed,
their long booming calls echoing in the air.
“Turnabout is fair play,” they said.
The politicians told the navies to shut up
before they pissed off Earth Defense.

By that time the aliens realized
that our soldiers were better
than anything else they had.
Cetaceans could do things with those weapons
that nobody ever dreamed before.

The dolphins fooled around with the popguns,
bursting targets and the hulls of careless boats,
until the aliens finally pulled them off the planet
and let them practice pulverizing asteroids.

The humpbacks took to the harmonichron
with terrifying ease.
They could shatter glass, warp metal…
and do the same to minds.

The blues favored the solaria
and learned to launch flares
with devastating precision,
singing the sun to deadly excess.

The sperm whales huddled around
the gravitic organ and
folded spacetime like origami.

We shuddered, remembering
what our species had done to the cetaceans,
praying they’d protect us anyway.

When the war reached us,
we hid ourselves underground
while Earth Defense swam out to meet them.

There was a moment of silence.

And then the very water of our bodies
rang and sang and
all but wrung its way out of our bones.

They say sound doesn’t carry in space,
but it carries loud and clear in subspace
if you put a harmonichron to your lips
and waken its reeds and then echolocate
through its forward membranes.

When the humpbacks sang their mortal mass,
hydrogen and oxygen bowed their heads
and electrons danced to the tune,
all through the system.

Most of us survived. Most.
Collateral damage, you know.
The enemy, well, they were in the target zone.
Briefly.

The dolphins in their pinships
zipped in and out of the enemy fleet
popping ships like toddlers gone mad with bubble-wrap.

The solar bombs never even got close.
The blues batted them back
with desultory flicks of electromagnetic fields.
A fleeing ship tried to slingshot around the sun
and was swallowed by sudden fire.

Barely half the fleet remained
when the sperm whales lost their patience
and began to fold, spindle, and mutilate
the spacetime continuum.

Later studies revealed a full quarter of the casualties
were suicides. Human minds
aren’t as flexible as cetaceans, it seems. Who knew?

Most of the enemy dreadnoughts died
when their reactor mass abruptly unbecame
into antimatter and overreacted dramatically.
All that remained were the scouts
Too small to hold a core drive of their own.
Reality rubbed against itself,
grinding the last few ships to sand,
and then snapped back to normal.

The sky was full of fire,
aurora veils and distant sparks of death.

“We’re next,”
we whimpered to each other.
“We’re next.”

But then the humpbacks
spat out their mouthpieces
and sang, softly into microphones,
the Requiem Mass.

They let us live.
Even the few surviving enemies
were allowed to surrender,
and when the distant scattered command
recovered, they sued for peace.
The cetaceans accepted.

Humans are no longer king-of-the-hill,
but that’s okay.
Nobody’s trying to kill us now.
We’ll learn to get along
with our cetacean siblings
and their alien friends.

It’s been slow going
to rebuild what we lost
to the war effort and collateral damage
and our own damn stupidity,
but we’re making good progress.

Someday,
all of Earth’s children
will achieve harmony.









Elizabeth Barrette writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in the fields of speculative fiction, nature studies, and alternative spirituality. Her latest books are From Nature's Patient Hands: A Collection of Poetry and Prismatica: Science Fiction Poetry Spanning the Spectrum. Recent poetry publications include "The Shipwright's Song" in Torn World, "Seasons of Power" in The Lorelei Signal, and "Othertongues" in Linger Fiction. Her current study is cyberfunded creativity, including the popular “Poetry Fishbowl” project presented on her blog The Wordsmith’s Forge (http://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/730515.html). Her favorite pastimes include suspension-of-disbelief bungee-jumping and spelunking in other people’s reality tunnels.