Nightmare Fuel / Old Man's War

• Other species are comparatively so strong and fast that humans have to be enhanced into Super Soldiers just to stand a fighting chance.
• A universe where there are too many species, but not enough worlds, and so endless war with everybody is the only option. At least according to the Colonial Union...
  • Wildcat colonies, lacking the protection of the CDF, suffer horrible fates at the hands of competing species. If the CU narrative is accurate (and not propagandizing), most of these colonies wouldn't be viable even without the threat of alien attack due to poor preparation and an unviably small population.
• For the last couple centuries, the CDF has had a consistent 75% death rate!
• Though the Transhuman CDF bodies give their soldiers incredible physical and mental abilities, it makes them vulnerable to:
  • Their thoughts being spied on.
  • Their motor control being turned off.
  • Their weapons being switched off.
  • Their blood being immolated.
• The skip drive can't beat the speed of light, it can only teleport you to your destination... in a parallel universe, to never return. Any old friend who has not been on the same spaceship with you since you last met is technically not your friend but an alternate version! Though the universes are functionally identical (except for an electron here or there), the idea creeps out the characters who discuss it.
• From the point of view of regular soldiers, the spooky, insular Special Forces - nicknamed the "Ghost Brigades" because they are clones of dead recruits. Spooky, because they are Artificial Humans with strange norms and habits, like having No Senseof Humor and favoring Electronic Telepathy over speech.
  • In a cosmically unlikely and spooky coincidence, John is rescued by and fights alongside the clone of his beloved dead wife.
  • The Special Forces soldiers think inhumanly fast, so it exhausts them to wait for regular humans to finish their sentences. Thus, they ignore regulars.
  • Having known no bodies other than supersoldier with enhanced Healing Factor, the Special Forces unflinchingly sacrifice limbs to win fights.
• The sheer number of aliens in this universe who eat humans.
  • The Salong, belying their appearance as wise deer people, turned some unlucky human colonists into livestock and ate babies as veal!
  • The Rraey are the most frequently-encountered "anthropophagic" species. The CDF soldiers intercept a Rraey celebrity cooking show about how to butcher and eat humans!
• Thomas dies to ambush by an intelligent slime that crawls down his throat and, when (due to his enhancements) that doesn't kill him, liquefies his insides.
• In the failed liberation of Coral, John's maiming a shuttle crash is described in gruesome detail. He breaks his leg and loses his jaw, leaving him suffocating on his own fluids, and is stuck that way for agonizing days, alone on a hostile planet. He survives..
  John: Most of my body was scraped over an area the size of Rhode Island!
• Humans Are the Real Monsters to many of the species the CDF fights
  • John has a mental breakdown as he stomps around like a Kaiju through the city of 1-inch-tall humanoids.
  • In the intro of the Ghost Brigades, an alien scientist describes the horrifying creatures invading their space station. They turn out to be humans.
• Why does the Colonial Union custom build each super soldier from the genes of a natural-born individual? The Ala defended themselves with clone soldiers. The Obin wiped out their military with an engineered virus and exterminated them.
• The Obin lack consciousness and they know it. They are willing to commit atrocities for Boutin because he promises he can give it to them.
• In the The Human Division, Equilibrium pirates ships, murders their crews, and turns their pilots into disembodied brains. We experience the sheer helplessness of such a situation from the point of view of one poor victim.
  • The Colonial Union uses brain removal as a punishment.
• The Colonial Union are ruthless:
  • They give a captured Rraey a genetic disease as a leash - he will die without their drugs.