Ves left Marella's office and boarded an armored shuttle that conveyed him towards the convention hall. Along the way, he tried but couldn't quite get Marcella's words to disappear from his mind.
On a whim, he activated his comm and performed a few casual searches on the galactic net.
The cursory search revealed a statistic that Ves had always overlooked. "Casualties as a result of collateral damage?"
He knew what collateral damage meant. Backlash against it arguably ended the Age of Conquest, which some people referred to as the Age of Warships. With the onset of the Age of Mechs, mass extinction and widespread slaughter ceased to happen, but that didn't mean it stopped happening entirely.
Missile barrages notoriously inflicted wide swathes of devastation. With the effectiveness of ECM these days, over eighty or ninety percent of missiles never hit their targets. Instead, they veered away and flew a bit further before exploding upon the first obstacle they came across.
