Once again the end result was me wanting to know more about the aliens than caring about the people and not-people of the story, which ought to be kind of sad, but when you get into these introspective military questions it can sometimes get overwhelming.
Maybe I just missed it, but did the Shardies do anything with the silicate once they dropped it, I got that they collected the other minerals but this seems a rather perplexing method to collect materials. I was actually pondering the idea of an alien species whose goal is to redact other aliens from planets, removing colonies to return them to what they were originally during this story, which might've been more interesting to me.
This is the one where the reality of hearing Oubliette, as tounge ad cheek as it was, then Shutdown, and then this struck me as curious. This one is certainly not pro-military in the way that Shutdown could have been, since being a bio-robot or whatever is probably not most people's dream! Before I started typing this, I realize that an interesting twist would be to assume that the captain is also a human image, where his relationship to the turtle soldier is real, and continuous in a way that the human crew doesn't feel.
One thing in the story that missed me was why the aliens used the humans to begin with, I understand that once they did the aliens actions became more human, but is that desirable, is thh best way to fight humans to think like them? I know that understanding your enemy is supposed to be important, but it seems like the aliens were doing exceptionally well at just blowing humans away that it seems odd for them to suddenly need us to defeat us.
Alas, I didn't listen to quite enough stories this time to entirely fill the front comment page with my comments!