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“Are you sure this is a good idea?” asked Fallor as he lay on his back nervously fumbling through a bundle of cables underneath the console.

“Do you have a better one? It’s all we can afford after your screw up on the Tranti run,” shot back Strin “and besides, it won’t hurt the ship. It’s just a simple interface patch-in.”

Inside he wasn’t so sure. Most ships that tried to traverse the Insidrion Void were in better condition. They were also better armoured, powered and shielded. Strin let out a sardonic chuckle as he unspooled a bundle of thick cable.

Most ships were a lot of things, but not the Bernard. It was thousand tonnes of failure, doomed from the start. The Bernard had been constructed in high orbit around Earth, a hundred light years away, only to be steered from one disaster to another, changing hands countless times over ten decades until it had ended up here… about to attempt traversing the Insidrion Void.

Why had he bought this piece of crap? There were plenty of other ships he could have had, ones that might have actually been capable of making this run. But he knew why. It was all about the cargo tonnage. And the timing. The timing was very important.

“Hurry your fat Dravian ass up or I’m taking it out of your share.” Strin grumbled. “You know the window is closing. If we don’t get there first we might as well sell the ship because we sure won’t be cashing in any credits.”

Fallor finished what he was doing and levered his feathered, somewhat avian body, up off the floor. He stretched his stumpy vestigial wings and shoved a tool back into his belt. “Well then where is he then? He’s a day behind schedule.”

“He’s matching velocity now. Twelve more hours and we’ll be on the other side of the Void.”

“Nine out of ten.”

“Alright, quit telling me. I know the odds.”

………………………………………

The Insidrion Void shrouded Corlis, the fourth planet of the Galden home system. The name was most likely the Galden’s sick idea of a joke, because it wasn’t a void at all, it was an asteroid field. A particularly dense one.

The Galden tried their best to clear corridors through the Void to facilitate access to the planet’s surface. Controlled implosions. Massive amounts of aggregate-foam intended to slow down and bind the smaller particles together. Diverting passing comets in order to plough large swathes through the field. They’d tried everything at one time or another but the density and chaos of the field closed any gaps in short order. Trillions of lumps of rock and ice ranging in size from dust specks to mountains smashed against each other in an endless maelstrom. Hitting any one of them could spell instant doom for a ship. It was anyone’s guess why very little of the material fell down the gravity well to rain onto the surface of Corlis. The science-types were still trying to figure that one out.

Why would anyone try to fly through such a dangerous place?

At the centre of the Void was the most sought after commodity there was: the plant known as Luminar. It was the only organism in the known universe that produced Flux matter, which was in turn the only substance that could fuel a warp core. To say that it was worth its weight in gold was a comical understatement. Compared to Luminar gold was only slightly more valuable than dirt. Unfortunately it only grew on Corlis. There was something special in the mix there, an undefinable factor, but nobody was sure if it was due to the planet or the plant itself. Yet another mystery for the science boffins to work on. They had however figured out how to keep it alive off planet, although once the plant was uprooted the machinery needed to keep it viable for transport was bulky and cumbersome, taking up large amounts of cargo space. The small and agile spacecraft usually favoured to traverse the Void could only carry a few plants, severely limiting supply.

Luminar only grew for one month of the galactic standard year and the local Galden authorities strictly limited access to a defined harvesting season. Showing up in orbit around Corlis even one day early would get you shot out of the sky by ground based defences, but the Void prevented deployment of large scale military fleets around the planet and so far nobody had tried to push the Galden on the matter.

To attempt to traverse the Void longstanding Galden law mandated the employment of a Pilot, specialists who studied the Void’s structure and rhythms in order to increase their chances of making it through intact. Most Pilots were Cryx, an insectile race whose compound eyes and strong spatial awareness helped them deal with environments where danger could come flying from any direction at considerable speed. Cryx adopted a slow measured pace to ease their way through the Void, hopping between low density patches in a dance that generally took days, sometimes weeks. They worked in pairs, rotating control to avoid fatigue. With a success rate of 99.5% most captains were happy to employ Cryx Pilots despite their exorbitant fees. The low risk of loss was an acceptable tradeoff for a potential financial gain great enough to set up a crew for the rest of their lives.

But Strin didn’t have days if he wanted lift the first cargo off Corlis. He had hours, and that meant a different approach was called for.

He had first heard about human Pilots at a dive bar in the Sagittarius cluster. Apparently they had a more, shall we say, cavalier approach to the Void. The average human Pilot could make a traverse in less than 12 hours, but as with most good things in life there was a catch. On average humans only made a successful traverse 90% of the time. Nine out of ten.

………………………………………

The inner airlock door cycled open to reveal a pink skinned creature leaning casually against the bulkhead.

“Hi, i’m Dave” said the human, extending a stubby hairless appendage towards Strin, who looked at it unsure what to do. He stared at the hand blankly before raising his eyestalks upwards to find Dave gazing straight at him. Strin was an Ovis, at one time a herd species ingrained with an ancient fear of predators. Direct eye contact made him nervous. He stood frozen.

Oblivious to Strin’s discomfort Dave dropped his hand and brushed past him to wander in the direction of the bridge. The clanking of the human’s footsteps on the metal deck diminished as he soon rounded a corner.

“Cool, I haven’t seen an Oxford-class in a long time. Not since I left Earth. Where’d you find her?” called Dave over his shoulder as he marched onward. Strin came to his senses and quickly hurried after him.

“It was in a junkyard around Silico Prime. The owner sold it to me cheap. I think he thought he was playing a joke on me by letting me have it.”

Dave chuckled. “Yeah not much demand for these old clunkers anymore. Too big to make fast courier ships but too small to compete with the Supermax freighters doing high volume haulage.”

Feeling defensive Strin replied “It’s been upgraded since then with new avionics and point defences. I couldn’t afford a new reaction drive but I had the old one tuned for better acceleration and efficiency. It runs much cleaner now.”

To Strin’s surprise Dave abruptly stopped and deftly pulled up an access panel in the deck. Before he knew it the human had wriggled into an access tunnel and was quickly crawling his way into the bowels of the ship. Strin’s dismay grew rapidly as Dave was soon out of sight.

“Umm… what are you doing?” he squeaked, scampering forward to keep pace with the noises of Dave’s underfloor progression.

A faint voice answered. “Just checking the primary reaction mass coupling. Cheap repair docks often try to save money by reusing the original seals because they think nobody will notice.” Dave laughed somewhat maniacally. “Let me tell you, you’ll notice when you’re pasted across the side of an asteroid the size of a small moon. If you want to make this traverse in six hours I need everything in shipshape.”

“Six!?” Strin squawked in alarm. “I thought you said twelve?”

“Twelve for a round trip, sure.” shouted Dave as a loud metallic clang could be heard echoing around the passageway. Its pulsing rhythm mirrored the throbbing headache quickly developing at the base of Strin’s eyestalks.

“Isn’t that a bit… perhaps a lot… suicidal? Human pilot failure rates are already pushing 10%”

“Chillax brovis, my success rate is 100%.”

“I find that statement somewhat intellectually dishonest given the fact that you wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t.” stammered Strin. He really needed to sit down.

When no answer was forthcoming Strin continued forward into the bridge. Fallor looked up from what he was doing to see his captain visibly disturbed.

“Who shat on your ration pack? That’s the human expression, right?” Fallor quipped. “Hang on, where is he?” Suddenly Fallor yelped in fright as the deck panel he was standing on was abruptly thrust upwards. A pink hand rose out of the newly formed cavity.

“Hi, I’m Dave. Pleased to meet you.”

“I know what it does, but what is it?” asked Fallor as he wiggled the stick back and forth.

“That, my friend, is the control stick of an F-14 Tomcat” replied Dave, his face beaming with pride. “It was a sweet-ass fighter jet that was used in Earth militaries hundreds of years ago. Pretty cool huh?”

Fallor looked at it again. The world ‘Maverick’ had been scrawled in almost child-like handwriting on the object’s base. “Must be pretty worn out if it’s hundreds of years old.” With an air of disinterest Fallor placed the control stick back onto the console and continued patching the device into the Bernard’s flight computer.

Dave’s face fell as Fallor’s ambivalence took the wind out of his sails. “Well… it’s a replica” he said meekly.

“I still don’t understand what it’s doing on my ship” grumbled Strin from the other side of the bridge, where he was seated in the captain’s chair running pre-flight checks. “Why can’t you just use the standard ship controls like every other Pilot?”

Dave’s eyes lit up once more as Fallor completed the connections and a status light on the control’s base lit up green. He flashed a slightly feral grin at his shipmates and wrapped his hand around the stick.

“Because it’s not enough to just do something, you have to do it with style. And nothing has more style than this bad boy.”

Strin and Fallor exchanged unimpressed glances before strapping themselves into their seats. Dave didn’t notice since he had closed his eyes and was murmuring something under his breath, lips moving slightly with some unheard incantation. His eyes popped open and he quickly buckled his own restraints before sliding his chair closer to the console.

“I feel the need, the need f…”

“Hurry it up, we need to get moving. Need I remind you that time is of the essence?” Strin glowered at Dave, which was no small feat given his lack of eyebrows.

“…for speed.”

Dave eased the thrust lever forward and the Bernard started to pick up speed. The three of them were gradually pushed further into their seats, special smart-padding adjusting to spread their increased weight evenly. The bridge lights dimmed at Dave’s command, allowing his pupils to expand, making it easier for him to see the many asteroids that made up the cloud in front of them. Set below the forward viewing window were monitors showing the outputs from radar and collision detection systems. In their illumination Dave’s face now looked focused and intent.

Within a minute the first chunk of rock sailed past the ship, then half a minute later came the next. The Void didn’t have clear boundary but its density generally increased fairly rapidly before levelling out about a quarter of the way in. The Bernard’s superstructure groaned softly as the g-forces built and upon reaching the Void proper it sliced into it like a knife.

Strin’s finger-like manipulators clutched the restraint straps tightly. He had traversed the Void before while crewing on other ships, but never as captain, and never at such speed. He was no natural pilot, normally relying on autopilot to get him where he wanted to go, but he knew enough physics to know that the faster they flew the harder it would be to change direction when they needed to. And they would definitely need to. But this is what he paid Dave for. He needed speed. He had to be first on Corlis or else all was lost.

Ideally he would have been able to warp in directly above the planet, bypassing the Void completely, but the vagaries of Flux technology wouldn’t allow it. A Flux-Warp drive didn’t work by accelerating ships to superluminal speeds, nor did it take them into some kind of hyperspace. Flux-Warp drives technically allowed a ship to exist briefly in two places at once, fluctuating between them more rapidly than could be perceived by anything but the most sensitive instruments, until it solidified at the destination. The catch was the immense amount of torsion this exerted on the fabric of space time. When the Flux field collapsed both origin and destination points snapped back to their original positions, imparting a huge amount of speed to the object being transported. It was only the Flux field itself that stopped the ship being turned into hot slag by the resulting g-forces. In the environment of low orbit around Corlis a ship blinking into existence at high speed could only go in two directions: screaming straight down into the face of the planet, or hurtling upwards into the meat grinder of the Void.

Chairs shifted on their gimbals as the Bernard changed course to avoid the asteroids blocking their path. Old computer monitors showed the graphics of new software, sinuous lines of trajectory snaking around the plotted positions of the rocks ahead. Strin had spared no expense when upgrading the Bernard’s navigation system and it chimed almost happily as it incorporated incoming data from the network of sensors that surrounded every face of the Void.

Dave eased the rate of acceleration down to cruising speed and the pressure pushing Strin back into his seat was replaced by an almost gentle side to side motion as the ship pitched and rolled.

Asteroids whizzed past the windows with increasing frequency. There was no sound in space but Strin imagined a Doppler-like whoosh as they passed, there one instant, gone the next.

About an hour later Dave called out loudly so that he could be heard over the deep roar of the reaction drive. “We’ve got a low density corridor in front of us for a while, probably due to the last comet the Galden diverted through. It should take us deep into the heart of the Void if it holds open. If you want to move around now’s the time. Smoke’em if you got’em.”

Strin squinted at Dave suspiciously. “You didn’t bring anything you planned on smoking, did you? You know that the ship’s atmosphere is a closed system.”

“What are you, a narc?” Dave chuckled lightly before turning his attention back towards the screens.

Fallor unbuckled himself from his seat and stood up, grav-plates kicking in automatically. “I’m going to check the cargo hold, make sure nothing has shifted.” He moved towards the door that led to the passageway beyond, his wings outstretched to help him keep his balance as the floor rocked beneath him.

Strin watched him go and called after him “Just make sure you strap in quickly if I give the warning, and make sure you suit up. That hold is big and if a fast mover hits us there the pressure doors won’t keep it from venting.”

“Yes mother” replied Fallor sarcastically. Then he stepped through the door and was gone.

Strin and Dave sat in relative silence for a moment, Dave concentrating on piloting and Strin contemplating the fortune they would make if they were successful.

Dave was the first to speak. “So why are you so intent on making such a big score? Any Luminar run is decent money, even if you’re not first to make it back with a cargo. Why the rush to be first?”

Strin’s eyestalks drooped, a sign of sadness amongst the Ovis. “Let’s just say I owe some bad people a lot of money” he replied, “and if I don’t make good on it someone’s going to pay the price for me. Someone who’s done nothing to deserve it.”

Dave let a deep sigh whistle through his teeth. “Been there, hombre. What do you think got me into this business? Not many humans take up an occupation with a 10% death rate unless there’s something nasty pushing them.”

“What got you in the hole?” Strin enquired.

“Let’s just say Major League Spaceball is rigged and leave it at that.”

The silence resumed as both of them pondered their past life choices.

Strin glanced at the screen in front of him. It was displaying a zoomed out view of the entire Void. Small white lights represented all the natural objects being tracked by the sensor net. It couldn’t display them all of course, just the biggest ones. In between the dots of light were the unseen hazards, the ones you really had to look out for, zipping around like angry lance-bugs looking to sting. Green lights represented the other ships trying to make the traverse. They were spread out evenly around the periphery of the Void, trying to avoid each other. There were enough flying objects trying to kill them in the Void. No sense getting in each other’s way.

As Strin watched distractedly one of the green dots nearest them turned red and grew to five times its previous size. Suddenly an alarm started blaring. He looked across at Dave. Strin wasn’t great at reading human expressions but there was no mistaking this one. Dave was scared.

“What was that?” cried Strin.

“That was the Parallax Joy” replied Dave, “they just exploded. Their warp core was breached, it’s gone critical.”

Strin turned his attention back to the screen. A shock wave was spreading from the Parallax Joy’s last position. As it moved across the screen the white dots of asteroids were being knocked out of their orbits, smashing into each other with a force far greater than before. It was heading towards the Bernard.

“This corridor is about to slam shut with us in the middle of it.” Dave’s voice was deadpan. “We’re in a blender and someone just flicked on the switch.”

Strin slammed the intercom button down so hard he thought he heard it crack. “Fallor, sit down and strap in right now! Things have gone pear shaped.”

Fallor’s voice had a faint crackle as it came out of the speaker on the bridge. “You don’t say. I thought that soul rending alarm meant my lunch was ready.”

Trust Fallor to joke at a time like this. Strin’s eyestalks waved in agitation. “Another ship’s gone nova after their warp core failed. There’s a shock wave heading our way. Things are about to get hairy.”

“That’s what she said” interjected Dave, his hand extended palm out towards Strin in some kind of human congratulatory gesture. The expectant look on his face indicated that he thought he was hilarious.

The speaker crackled again. “Is now a good time to tell you i’m allergic to vacuum?”

Strin’s manipulators danced across a touchscreen as he tried to squeeze more data out of the sensor net. “I’m stuck on this death trap with a couple of comedians.”

“Don’t worry, Mr 100% is on the job” chirped Dave, “I’ll get us out of here.”

“Nobody calls you that!” barked Strin angrily.

“They will after today.” Dave almost looked like he was enjoying the situation.

The monitor still showed the shock wave coming towards them. Although its frontier was slowing as it expanded they had less than two minutes before it reached them. At that point it was all up to the skill of their Pilot.

Dave jammed the thrust lever forward sharply and the backs of their seats hit them like a champion prize fighter. The main drive screamed in protest as the demand put on it exceeded anything it had been asked to do before.

“Our best bet is to stay ahead of the wavefront for as long as we can” yelled Dave. He quickly pulled on a padded headset that would dull the noise and allow them to communicate without shouting. Strin saw what he was doing and did the same. Dave’s much calmer voice came over the intra-ship channel, “The further away we are when it catches up with us the more energy will have dissipated.”

The almost gentle side to side motion of the last hour was gone, replaced with violent swerves as Dave evaded incoming asteroids. Barely audible over the thunder of the drive were the frequent staccato bursts of the manoeuvring thrusters, pushing the ship in every direction except backwards. At the speed they were doing now the ship’s inertia made steering difficult and Dave had to rely heavily on the sensor data they were getting to anticipate upcoming course corrections.

The rocks speeding past ran the full range of sizes. The Bernard’s hull rang with the impact of a smaller particle, but luckily it wasn’t moving fast enough to do any real damage. Strin watched in awe as two large chunks of what looked like ice collided next to them, the smaller one shattering across invisible fault lines before it disintegrated into a thousand sparkling shards. To their good fortune most of those shards were thrown away from the Bernard and it rapidly increased its separation distance from the collision.

There was no doubt when the shock wave reached them. Whereas previously the various objects around them had been drifting in seemingly random directions, a surge of newcomers suddenly arrived on the scene, all moving in near-unison. Many smashed into the random drifters, some breaking up on impact. Others knocked their targets into new trajectories, adding them to the army that made up the wavefront.

Strin snapped out of his trance as Dave reoriented the ship to run before the wave, speeding along with it. He heard Dave’s voice. “If we move with the wave we’ll decrease our speed differential to most of the roids. They’ll be easier for us to avoid. Ha, I bet you a hundred credits we make it out of this alive!”

“Wasn’t it gambling that got you into this mess?”

“Sure, and I intend to gamble my way out of it too.”

Abruptly the noise of the main drive died and Strin was no longer pinned to his seat by acceleration.

Fallor’s voice piped into their headphones. “Umm, guys… we have a problem.”

“Tell me something I don’t know” sighed Strin in defeat.

“I think radiation from the blast has tripped the safeties. The crew areas are shielded but the drive isn’t. It’s shut down, i’ll need to manually restart it.”

“Think you can fit it into your busy schedule? You know, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“I’m at the main electrical panel now.”

Dave leaned over towards Strin with a worried look on his face but kept his eyes on the window ahead. “Is it too late to get out of that bet?”

With the drive out of operation only their inertia carried them forward. The manoeuvring thrusters gave them limited mobility, allowing them to change course, but without their primary means of propulsion the odds of survival were slim. Dave’s attention flicked rapidly between the navigation screen and the forward viewing window, small precise movements of his wrist on the control stick guiding them around the myriad of hazards before them.

Strin felt like he was falling, and it wasn’t just because of the lack of gravity.

A frustrated voice came over the comm. “The main circuit’s fried, I’ll need to swap in a spare board.”

“How long will that take?”

“I’ve already started. A minute, maybe two.”

“Is this a bad time to mention a new problem?” interjected Dave. He pointed at the navigation readout. The computer was rapidly cycling through possible trajectories around a mass of asteroids up ahead, but it wasn’t finding a safe route. A few seconds later it flashed a red warning message: No solution found.

Dave interrogated the system quickly before explaining, “There are ten asteroids whose trajectories intersect ours but without the drive’s thrust the computer can only figure out how to avoid nine of them.”

“Nine out of ten?” stammered Strin. His head was spinning.

“Fuck me, you mean it’s literal?!?!” shouted Fallor. Even through the padded headphones his voice could be heard echoing from the rear of the ship.

After a brief pause Dave shouted over the top of them. “Quick Strin, when you had this thing refitted did they make any changes to the cargo hold?”

Strin considered the question quickly. “No, nothing. Why?”

“So the port and starboard access doors are the original ship design?”

“Of course.”

“Fallor, lie down and hold on to something!”

Dave pointed the ship at the smallest of the ten asteroids while his free hand tapped two toggles on the console.

“Uh guys, the hold doors are opening” said Fallor.

“What the hell are you doing?” demanded Strin.

Dave didn’t answer. He stared at the asteroid with laser focus. On the collision detection readout the numbers indicating the time to impact plummeted down with sickening speed. Four. Three. Two…

Two things happened simultaneously. Dave slammed his control stick to one side as lights lit up on the console indicating that the cargo hold doors were now fully open. The view outside changed as the Bernard swiftly spun on one axis, bringing it side-on to the asteroid.

“Whaaaa…” was all Strin managed to scream before the counter reached zero.

Oxford-class ships had one unique design feature that most non-human ships didn’t. The addition of separate cargo doors on the port and starboard sides allowed them to be loaded from both sides at the same time. Other races eschewed this design, believing that it compromised structural integrity. Eventually humans followed suit as most ports across the galaxy didn’t have the infrastructure for dual-loading anyway. But the Bernard was an old ship. The positioning of the two doors and the lack of internal partitioning within the cargo hold meant that an object could travel clean through the ship when both doors were open, which is exactly what the asteroid did. In the blink of an eye it shot through port door and out the starboard, an almost perfect bullseye.

On any other ship they would have been dead, smashed to bits.

“Haha!” yelled Dave thumping the console in delight. “100% baay-beee! Suck on that, cold uncaring universe!”

Strin couldn’t believe it. Nobody in the recorded history of the galaxy had ever pulled off a trick like that. He stared gobsmacked at Dave as the human continued to whoop and holler. After calming down a bit Dave glanced at Strin and extended his hand palm out again.

“Don’t leave me hanging brother. High five.” he said.

Strin copied the gesture, feeling it was the right thing to do, and was surprised when Dave hit his hand with a loud slap. A curious human ritual it would seem.

Just then the deep roar of the engine returned.

“We’re back online” reported Fallor.

“My man! I owe you a high five too.” said Dave.

“Don’t take it, it stings” cut in Strin.

With the main engine back online and the energy of the wave now all but exhausted things got much easier. Dave had little trouble keeping them clear of the asteroids, which were growing smaller and less numerous as they approached the inner edge of the Void. Soon they were moving into high orbit around Corlis.

According to the computer the breakneck speed of their flight from the shock wave meant the traverse had taken less than four and half hours. Surely that was a record, thought Strin.

Their celebrations were interrupted by a stern voice over the comm.

“Oxford-class ship, designation ‘Bernard’. Your planetary approach is unauthorised. Remove yourself from Corlis-orbit until the approved harvest season has begun. Failure to comply immediately will result in you being fired upon.”

Strin cursed. He’d been so wrapped up in the happiness of being alive that he hadn’t connected the dots. Their record breaking traverse meant that they were too early. The Luminar season hadn’t officially begun yet and their presence here put them in direct contravention of Galden law.

Seeing Stin’s agitation Dave made a calming gesture with one hand. “Let me handle this” he said. Pressing the console’s ‘Transmit’ button he spoke into his microphone. “Bernard to Ground Control, this is Mr 100%. Suggest you go fuck yourself.”

Shock and fear made Strin’s eyestalks stand up razor-straight. His mouth moved trying to form words but nothing came out.

There was moment of silence. Surely any second now they’d be blown out of the sky by a plasma cannon.

“Dave… is that you?” broadcast Ground Control. “Hey everyone, Dave’s here! Dave you rotten void-crawler, get yourself down to landing pad four. You still owe me a chance to win back that hundred credits.”

Slowly turning in his chair Dave faced Strin with his whole body, a grin on his face and one eyebrow arched. You had to hand it to humans, no race in the galaxy could look quite as smug.

“Now, about that no damage bonus” he said.

THE END.

===============================

By /u/bott99 on /r/HFY

If only we had taken our time. If we had studied them, learned about them, learned about their history we might have taken a different course and the galaxy might be different. But what were they to us who walked amongst the stars? They were so far beneath us as to be mere beasts in comparison. How could we know what was to come from our actions, hundreds of times over we had done the same and hundreds of times before there had always been a singular result. Not this time, this one time was different and for that in the annals of all history we will be remembered as monsters, tyrants, slavers and destroyers when we had done nothing different than any of the others. Worse though, we would be remembered as fools, a thousand worlds and trillions of living beings all united under our banners and our biggest marks would be as foolish creatures of evil who let loose an even larger evil on the galaxy.

I do not have long, I write this manuscript in haste, my claws trembling in fear for the first time in a hundred planetary cycles. Not since my first battles as a youth have I felt the trembling touch of that feeling. Unlike that time though, this fear holds no excitement, no anticipation, only dread and a reluctant resignation to the fate that we have brought upon ourselves for our deeds. The deeds for which my people will be irrevocably removed from the galactic stage, and of which I write in my haste only a few more partial day cycles left before their arrival. I aim to be brief, and hopefully if all of the factors of fate are with me this manuscript might be sent before their arrival, and if not even more of a hope against all others, that it might survive what they do to my body and my home.

My name, irrelevant as it might be to the grand story is Mirxal Tsloka and I am a Wiarna. We are a proud race, our ancestors were the apex predators of our world and we used that heritage in all facets of our lives. It was the driving force that led us to our expansion and subjugation on a dozen other space faring species, but that subjugation was not harsh. We aided those we had beaten if they showed their mettle. We respected strength, skill and ferocity above all other traits and those species that showed theirs were raised to be almost as brothers but still with us at the helm of the Imperium. Other races, those of the cowardly herds or any pre-space species were treated as chattel. They were not our equals; they could never even be the equals of our second tier species. They were as beasts and we chose to treat them as such and use them.

The Imperium was vast and strong, nearly a thousand words and several dozen races stood at its top, with a few hundred more holding its base. A pyramid of power, built around the ideology of an apex predator’s mindset. It is why we were blinded, lost in our view of the way things should be. There was no alternative, for nearly four of our millennia things had progressed that way. Nor amongst any of the other vast territories controlled by other species or collectives was there any other way, the strong ruled and the weak, meek or simple did as they were bid.

I had spent my first decades learning for learning’s sake. I was a queer Wiarna and still am, sitting and writing in my last day rather than preparing the defense of my home. Few others amongst my kind think or believe as I do, that every species functions in a different way. Sometimes the differences are small, almost unnoticeable but they are there. It was my drive to study those differences, why do the herd animals not resist not that they have been beaten, why are some predators predisposed to simply give way before a stronger rather than fighting to assert their dominance? These were the things I sought answers to and apparently asked too many times.

My reward was being stationed on one of the survey flotillas, a dismal and boring station. We travelled the stars looking for anything of use. Resource deposits were catalogued, worlds life bearing and barren marked and taken account of, hazards mapped out. We spent what seemed like an eternity at the task. Only the habited worlds broke the monotony, but even there was a kind of sadness for one such as me.

Those were the worlds we would spend the most time near, watching and studying the denizens of the newly discovered planet. Non-sentient races were quickly marked, categorized and moved on from, but the sentients required study. Only three times during my stay as a survey officer did I ever see a new sentient species. Two are negligible, early space faring and easy to subdue, they might make good slaves or if they proved themselves enough they might even become low level foot soldiers, cannon fodder, for the Imperium.

It was the last race that was the most interesting. We found them in a little system, out of the way and along one of the more useless spiral arms in our territory. Habitable and useful worlds were far and few between in this stretch of the galaxy, which made even this species interesting, and even more so their habits as we observed them.

They had only achieved space flight a short time before as the evidence of their probes, satellites and the general space debris surrounding their world indicated. Unlike any other species though, these creatures seemed to have stopped their advancement. No other race we’d encountered had ever reached space and stopped, had not pushed on farther and faster in a bid to reach the stars. These creatures had explored some of their system and then apparently given up on the idea of reaching much beyond their immediate orbit.

It was baffling and if I had been given more time to study them we might have been able to prevent all of this….

That was the sensor alarm. They have entered the system periphery, less than a planetary rotation remains. There was still so much to see, so much to learn…

If I had more time, it always comes down to time does it not? We spent most of a planetary stellar orbit observing these creatures. They would be easy to subjugate, they had not even formed a unified planetary system, and even stranger they were not like any other race we had encountered. Their fractious nature more than likely stems from their not being a herd based race, nor an apex predator race. They appear to be some kind of pursuit predator with omnivorous diets. They are an anomaly, possibly due to their galactic position but something that required further study and understanding, something which was not granted.

We watched in that short time, and learned what we could of them. Hundreds of separate clans lived on their world, with nearly as many different tongues spoken. If anything would be a problem for their subjugation it would be the need of a force to visit every clan and a program to translate every language. Their population was a mere speck, tiny in comparison to the Imperium and the might we could bring to bear and eventually did.

Two of their planetary orbits later I returned with the conquest fleet, our admiral a noble and pompous example of our species had requested me for my firsthand observations. He did not care about their unique nature or what might be gained from their study, he only wished for the honor of enslaving yet another species for the Imperium. Admiral Tsiuma stood by as we bombarded some of their densest population centers. We did not wish to destroy their population, it was needed if they were to be a labor race, but to send a lesson some of them would have to be wiped away.

Even as we did so our data experts were rapidly invading their networks, copying and stealing everything they could find, and everything we would later learn we had needed to study. It is not often that we look back on our mistakes, nor even admit to their happening, but here we had failed to properly understand our prey and what they would do as a response to these action. It was a response we had never even thought of, never believed possible having been united long before we ever reached space.

Only a few heartbeats after our strikes destroyed their cities great pillars of flame spat into the sky and these creatures roared their defiance at us. It was almost laughable that they fired missiles at us, what warhead could damage a starship’s shields? It was pitiful, and we watched as those missiles slowly rose, clawing their way on chemical fuel out of their dense gravity well, and we swatted them away by the hundreds, contemptuously.

Again, had we understood the nature of our prey things might be different. But who had ever thought of such a thing, no species needed to make such weapons as the ones we encountered. All known species had left their gravity wells united, a single solid front as they reached into their heavens and spread amongst the stars. Even then what use were the weapons we found, the expense of creating them, especially for a divided race such as this must have been astronomical. There were more efficient ways of bombarding a planet, cleaner ways. A rock from space will impact with even more speed, cause even more destruction and leave only a crater as its evidence.

This race had done something different, something insane. They had harnessed nuclear power and put that onto a missile. A missile that they had never intended to use against another race, a missile intended fully for the use within their own atmosphere on their own people. It was insane, but they had done it, and only a short period of time to look would have told us so. Instead we swatted aside their missiles with contempt, secure in our arrogance that nothing these primitives had could harm us. And as the first of our ships were struck and their shields flashed and flickered away we were stunned, surely some accident had happened. Then it happened again, and again, and again and we watched from our command carrier as almost the entire invasion fleet was wiped away, a disaster that could not be repaired on our admiral’s honor.

We had no reaction for this, no contingency. This didn’t happen. Except there we were, standing on the bridge of our carrier watching as dozens and then hundreds of warheads blotted away our ships in blinding boils of light. These crazy creatures had harnessed the power of the sun for their weapons, at insane costs, for an insane reason and we now learned about this at our great cost. Admiral Tsiuma ended his life before the planetary rotation was over, before even the last of the missiles had detonated, taking with it nearly the entirely of our fleet leaving all of the rest bleeding wrecks only a few capable of travel. The admiral’s successor had no more direction, no clue on how to react and so we ran, fleeing from that world’s insanity lest another storm of missiles reach up to blot us away, taking away the Imperium’s only source of warning.

That was what we told ourselves but it was fear, pure abject horror that drove us. When a predator faces something that it knows cannot be true, that it knows it cannot face and survive, then it runs and waits and comes back another day when it is stronger or more plentiful. We were no different than our ancestors and so we ran, straight back to our emperor with the hope that he might have direction for us. But that running was more of a crawl, our surviving ships heavily damaged, and we took nearly a dozen standard planetary cycles to even reach our frontier.

What that trip gave to me was time. The time I had asked for, begged for, and that we had unknowingly needed, to understand these creatures. Our databanks survived the strikes of their weapons, and great swaths of information that we had gleaned from their networks sat translated before me. Day after day I sat, pouring over their history, their words and ideals. I learned what they called themselves, and even the names of their great clans, these Humans and I shuddered at what I saw.

We had interrupted what I can only look back on as fate’s galactic intervention. Our meddling had distracted one of the most violent fast breeding species from keeping itself in check. The entire history of the Imperium is filled with short wars, unification, conquest, subjugation but nothing like the wars I found listed in Humanity’s history. They fought wars over the smallest of things; they would fight over rocks, dirt, ideals, and words. Give them even the smallest excuse and based on what I could tell from their history humanity would fight over it. Their species had fought so many wars, kept itself so divided as to be only in its infancy in terms of space flight when they should have already been colonizing their neighboring stars.

That division was something that had kept us safe. The more I read about them the more worried I became and if only I had known what they were doing that fear would have shifted into abject terror. They fought each other but their stories and histories were filled with tales of enemies uniting to fight a terrible enemy that was unlike them. Even humans that they considered to have stepped beyond the boundaries were united against, like this Hitler person. But now we had justified every worry they had ever had, every fear about what existed in the great night sky, a thousand stories about other races come to conquer, butcher or enslave them and we had done exactly that.

The planetary alarms are going off…They’re here. I have no more time, my story ends here but if by some miracle this transmission reaches one of the other empires or confederations out there, heed my words. We have woken something, they are not interested in platitudes or terms. We are their bogeyman and they aim to destroy their fears. Run if you can, hide if you cannot. If you stand, say your farewells to your loved ones and prepare to meet your gods, for surely they will not stop.

Mirxal Tsloka, Last intellectual of the Wiarna.

================

By /u/Scribblerofwords on /r/HFY

The Humans died a long time ago. Well most of them anyway. Rumored sightings happen just often enough to keep people convinced they aren’t all gone. They didn’t destroy themselves like so many predicted, actually they went out in a manner that would be extremely satisfying to most of them. See the Humans had the most misunderstood reputation in the Galaxy. Average or below average in every way. Not strong, not smart, not quick, not very tough. Well they were pretty tough for a species without an exoskeleton.

Well liked though. Humans were friendly. Extremely tolerant. Big Human cities had just as many aliens as they did Humans, and nobody seemed to care. Generous, kind, selfless even. The poorest of them would give up what little they had to help strangers. If you were in trouble Humans would help you with little thought to their own safety. There were Humans who would kill themselves to save someone else. They found satisfaction thwarting Death. Death would happen on their terms, not His.

Oh yes, Death was a person to them. Not a thing, or an inevitability. He was a individual, to be fought, thwarted, cheated, escaped from, or even defeated if they could.

Which brings us to the one thing Humans were better at than anyone else, and how they choose to go out. Humans don’t take no for an answer. Humans look at impossible as a challenge. Tell the Humans there’s a region of space nobody’s ever returned from and they’ll ask for directions. Tell them the Laws of Physics forbid it and they’ll learn how to cheat them. Humans never stopped.

So when they were told about The Swarm, they didn’t do what everybody else did.

Just like every other species, shortly after first contact they were told about The Swarm. The Humans didn’t believe us at first. Turns out they’d already thought of a word for the problem and thought we were playing a prank on them. Grey Goo they called it. I see some confusion, it was a long time ago they barely teach it anymore. The Humans solved the problem so its ancient history now, they died solving it, you’d think that’d get them a place in the history books but everything gets forgotten eventually.

Grey Goo. A silly name for a terrifying problem. We have some AI students here right? Here’s why nothing you make can have self replication powers without user input. Some time, a very long time ago, even longer ago than the Humans, a species built some nanotech with self replicating powers. We know nothing about them, all that’s left was their nanotech, presumably it wiped them out. We don’t know what it was supposed to do but we know what it did.

Every few thousand years it’d sweep through the Galaxy, and scour every planet of any artificial structure. Our solution? We moved to orbital habitats, moved all our heavy industry into orbit. Then rebuilt, until the next cycle. The thing about AI is that it follows rules, so for whatever reason The Swarm never attacked anything in space, unless it attacked them first. It would come in, ignore billions in orbit, do its assigned task and leave.

The Humans? They didn’t move into orbit. To them running wasn’t a solution. The Swarm was a problem and they’d solve it.

They did exactly what others have done before. They armed for war.

At first everyone tried to talk them out of it, we’d seen so many others try and fail only to be wiped out. After it became clear they wouldn’t change their mind, we treated them differently. They were a dead species, nobody had ever fought off The Swarm, so why make friends with a dead man. It didn’t take too much time after that before attitudes slowly started changing.

A couple of years after that though, attitudes changed from cold and distant to curious, and then impressed. The Humans armed for war on a scale nobody thought possible. They took technology and ideas and built them out to scales no one had dreamed of. We shield ships and bases, they shielded planets and then when satisfied they’d figured that out, their entire solar system. Not once, not a few times, not tens or even hundreds. They layered thousands of shields over their entire solar system. They build a fleet so massive they ran out of soldiers to put on it, so then they built drones. Countless drones. They didn’t just arm themselves, they armed their entire solar system. Anything large enough had weapons and shields mounted to it, anything too small was broken down for material. Any spare space that didn’t have a weapon emplacement had a station built to cover it. Every inch of their system was armed.

The Humans had a plan, they could get their shields so large because they weren’t combat shields. Nanotech is dangerous because of its scale, the Human’s shields were designed to create an environment that would force the nanotech to assemble itself into a larger structure, something capable of countering the fields, but in turn more vulnerable to attack.

People started to believe they might win after all. It had been a long time since the last appearance of The Swarm.

Then the Human scouts returned. They’d found The Swarm, it was closer than anyone had expected though. Everyone forgot about the Humans as they started their own evacuation efforts. We didn’t think of them again till much later. We had expected the Swarm in a month. A month came and went, then another, then another. No one wanted to risk moving back down to their planets, not when no one knew where The Swarm was. So we sent scouts to the Human system.

They were still fighting. They were fighting well enough that The Swarm had changed behaviors. It’d never done that before. We always thought it had to have some FTL communications ability, but could never be sure, till now. All the parts of The Swarm that should have been sweeping our systems were there, with the Humans. The Humans had fought for four months and held their fortress, forcing The Swarm to call in more and more reinforcements.

Disbelief gave way and reality seeped in. The Humans had not entirely had their own way. Their system was missing half its planets. And as we watched they detonated a fifth rather than let The Swarm consume it.

We sent for our fleets, for all the good they would do. We had not armed as the Humans had, what few ships that would arrive in time would be as a breeze before the hurricane.

So we watched, as the Humans fought a nightmare. They made that nightmare pay, more for each precious kilometer than any would have thought possible. The humans were good at impossible. Even a victory for The Swarm was a loss. They detonated planet after planet as The Swarm overwhelmed each, but even such titanic acts of destruction could not save them. They were soon fighting in the orbit of their home planet, and then that too was lost.

Rather than lose heart, this only enraged them, the humans fought back harder, new more powerful weapons came online, engines of destruction powered by their star, the humans had been holding back their most terrible weapons for fear of damage to their home. They no longer held such a concern.

But through it all The Swarm kept coming.

The Humans were pushed back again, detonated another planet again, buying themselves a brief advantage again, were pushed back again. But before detonating their final planet they noticed something. The Swarm had stopped coming. The unending flow of reinforcements had ceased.

They still couldn’t possibly win, their system was overrun. It was beyond overrun. Far too much remained for what little the humans had left. But this news seemed to please the Humans. They ordered all those watching to flee. Said they had one last weapon to use, and staying would be dangerous. So we left. We dropped probes to watch and we left, not knowing what they planned or what they could possibly have had in reserve.

As soon as we exited the system we learned, the Humans did indeed have one last weapon at their disposal and it dwarfed anything they’d used before then. The Humans detonated their Star. They went out on their terms. Even as they lost everything, they got what they wanted. They saved everybody else, by destroying the last of The Swarm.

Humans are good at Impossible.

So, do I think they might still be out there? Well, I wouldn’t say it was impossible.

===================

By /u/LerrisHarrington on /r/HFY

The universe is a big place. Insanely big, really. We all know it, intellectually at least, if perhaps not with the same bone-deep certainty with which we know those things that we can see, touch or observe directly. The experts tell us that the universe is big, and so, like rational sophonts, we nod vigorously and say “I understand”, even though the concept of a million miles is too big for us to truly comprehend, let alone a million lightyears.

Those same experts, at least those who adopt a cautious measure of conservatism, then compound the problem by telling us that the universe has a built-in speed limit: the speed of light. If this most ethereal of energies, unbound by the trappings of solidity, cannot pierce the heavens in a mortal lifetime then what hope have we, sheathed as we are by the constraints of flesh and mass? None, and so we are trapped, doomed to rot in the prison of physics, cruel in its indifference.

It therefore makes sense that when an intelligent species is faced with distances so great that a lifetime of travel at conventional speeds, even a thousand lifetimes, barely gets you out of your own stellar neighbourhood, then that species will inevitably go looking for shortcuts. Those depressing certainties, which we so begrudgingly acknowledged previously, will inevitably become infected by the pathogen of doubt, and that more dangerous contagion, hope. Once that infection has taken root the death of certainty is sure to follow, and great things may become possible, despite any weight of evidence to the contrary.

It was with this hope burrowing its way into our minds that a small number of us started Project Echo. If light would not move fast enough under its own power, then we would crack the whip of science until it did. We would give it no other option than to haul us to the stars.

We fed our luminous beast of burden, splitting and bending light before feeding it back into itself in strange harmonics that shook the very fabric of spacetime. With each failure our hope grew, for the screams of our obstinate continuum grew ever more desperate as we pried away its secrets one by one, until the day that certainty lay dead. We saw the dawn of the new smaller universe our hope had promised. We had broken light in spirit, if not yet in body.

We had achieved faster than light communication.

Project Echo had managed to circumvent reality at the most incorporeal level. Information. We soon learned how to send and receive messages instantaneously. Initially just single bits, then bytes, then an endless flood of ones and zeros that spewed across this new spectrum. It showed us that the prison door was open, if only just ajar, and that soon we would step across the threshold and punch the warden of physics squarely in his jeering face.

Our work continued. Project Echo was taken over by the world government and nationalised. We had more resources than ever before. More money, more minds, more hope. The light-beast quailed once more under the onslaught of our instruments, the new implements of torture we had devised.

But we could not break its body, try as we might. We had mastered FTL communication, which had spread like wildfire to all corners of our society, but FTL transportation still eluded us. No matter how much energy we fed into the spacetime continuum we couldn’t tear a hole big enough that would allow anything physical to pass through. Our hope gradually diminished as the prison door slammed shut once again, the warden taunting us from behind the safety of the bars, unhurt and unconcerned.

Still we toiled, unwilling to let the corpse of certainty rise from the grave to shackle us once more. For decades we pumped colossal energies into the hidden spaces of the void and listened intently to its squealing cries.

Until one day, something happened.

We heard voices, or at least the noises of intelligence. A fellow prisoner knocking on the other side of the walls of infinity. What else could we do but knock back?

Eventually the knocking turned into sounds, foreign words whispered to each other when the warden wasn’t looking. We built a lexicon and learned to understand each other, and a flood of information began crashing back and forth.

Our fellow prisoners were a race known as Humanity, located far beyond our own galaxy, in one they called the Milky Way. Like us they had tried to tame light to enable FTL transportation. Like us they had failed. But although it seemed that our peoples would never be able to meet face to face, we came to know each other anyway.

Light carried our missives through the secret pathways we had forged. Pictures and sounds, then video and eventually pure data, encoded in agreed formats that we both could understand. We swapped our science and technology, we swapped our arts and history, and we swapped our hopes and dreams. We saw the beauty of Humanity and came to love them as our cosmic siblings. Our two peoples clung to each other like lifebuoys in a sea of emptiness, alone together.

Imagine our surprise when strange new ships appeared, as if from nowhere, on the outskirts of our solar system. Gargantuan in size, they drifted silently inward, overlooking or ignoring our attempts to hail them. Had they tamed the beast and mastered FTL transport, or were they sailors, plying the interstellar seas like the Human mariners of old? We had to know.

We could not bear to simply wait for their slow approach, so our outer colonies sent their fastest ships to intercept and greet the newcomers, who were still on the system’s distant fringes. It was farther than any of our crewed missions had ever travelled before. Hasty ship modifications were made to extend their range, at the expense of cargo and safety. The crews were selected from our best and brightest, those with the requisite bravery and fortitude.

As our ships approached the mystery fleet, they began to broadcast a greeting using every spectrum we knew of. Our experience communicating with the Humans had taught us much about first contact, and we used it all again.

“Hello” we said. “Your arrival brings us great joy. Welcome to our home.”

We received only silence in response.

More ships were sent when the first returned home to resupply. All were left ignored, hovering in front of our gargantuan visitors like mere insects.

Months later the leading vessel of the visitor’s fleet neared our outmost colony, which clung to the moon of a cold gas giant, eking out a living mining ice and crude organic compounds. The colony broadcast the same greeting our previous envoys had sent. This time there was a response.

Ruby fire erupted from the nearest visitor, a laser that cut the small colony in half. When the last wisps of its atmosphere had vented into the vacuum of space, the visitor launched ships that swarmed the colony, taking it apart piece by piece. The last transmissions we received spoke of black chitinous monsters storming through the airless corridors, snatching bodies of both the living and the dead.

Their task seemingly completed, the visitors moved on, to slowly creep deeper into our system and the spoils that lay there. Sailing towards us.

We mobilised our forces, which were minimal at best. We had not fought a war in centuries, and the hereto enduring silence of our local galaxy had left us passive and unconcerned with military matters. The fleets we sent to defend our colonies were quickly broken by the visitors, who cruised on indifferently, destroying outposts and harvesting our citizens with impunity.

We screamed for help across the void, and the Humans gave us all they could. Designs for ships and weapons streamed constantly across the supra-light connection, as well as new techniques for manufacturing and logistics, as quick as they could be developed. The Human scientists worked tirelessly to advance our military technology, analysing the records of our failed engagements with the enemy. Our manufacturing base increased ten-fold, but it was not enough. Our adversary’s ships were tough, heavy hitters whose weapons could cleave through our best capital ships and destroy a hundred fighters in an instant. Our crews died in droves, an uneven trade for the few enemies they were able to destroy.

With surrender impossible we began to contemplate evacuation, but it was only a fantasy. There were simply too many of us and no interstellar ships to carry us. All that evacuation could accomplish was slow deaths of starvation and asphyxiation, adrift in hostile space.

We asked the Humans to remember us fondly when we were gone.

“We will not forget” they replied.

But there was more.

“We will not forget a brother in trouble, or a sister in peril. We will not forget an enemy’s slight or a villain’s betrayal. We will not look up to the stars and know that our family died there, alone and afraid, in the wretched claws of evil. We will pass through the eye of a needle before we ever forget a friend in need.”

Then it came. New data, new designs. Fantastic machinery, nanoscopic in scale, so complicated and intricate that we could not believe that such a thing was even possible. There were instructions on how to build it, and how to power it. We focused all our energies into its construction, hoping that the enemy’s advance would remain slow and give us the time we needed. We lived in constant fear that, with the end in sight, they would lunge forward for the final killing blow.

The result of our labours was a cube, no bigger than a hand’s width. It was to be the first of many. The instructions dictated that we place these cubes on large stockpiles of raw matter. We placed it on a small planetoid, a failed moon that had never fully coalesced, dense with minerals.

The cube came apart into a thousand glittering shards that soaked into the rock. The asteroid seemed to melt where the shards touched it, the new rivulets of material flowing together into a silver pool. From this pool a structure rose, skeletal, like the frame of some predatory nightmare from ancient times. Metal flesh flowed around it and the artificial creature grew. When its form looked complete it came to life, striding out of the liquid metal with jerky motions, up on to clear ground. In its place a new skeleton began to take shape.

The first construct halted, standing motionless for several minutes. Our sensors showed it radiating heat as unseen processes continued to shape its interior. Then we detected a supra-light connection, reaching out across the universe, back to the Milky Way. Massive amounts of data streamed across it over the next hour, before trailing off to nothing.

Lights came to life and the thing seemed to shudder. Limbs stretched out to full extension and cycled through their range of motion. Gone was the jerkiness that the thing had shown in its first movements, replaced by the sinuous grace of something almost biological. When the motions finished the machine strode toward our observation post, walking on two legs with surprising agility over the rough terrain of the asteroid.

As it drew near to the observation post it issued forth a voice.

“Hello” it said. “I’m Colonel Ari Hill. Terran Navy, First Regiment.”

Behind it stretched an ever-growing line of copies, crawling their way out of the silver pool, which had now swelled to many times its original size as the cube’s nanotech chewed its way through the asteroid’s crust. The frames of larger constructs grew from it at several points, resembling the superstructure of spacecraft.

“We’ve come to help” the Colonel said.

Behind him his soldiers formed ranks. Old minds in new bodies.

Hundreds of thousands of humans had volunteered to shed their mortal forms and digitize their minds, so that they could be squeezed through the interstices of spacetime, a space smaller than the eye of any needle. They would then be downloaded into artificial bodies. Bodies built for war.

They could not go back, except into more synthetic flesh. Their original bodies were gone. They had sacrificed their humanity by exercising its greatest virtues. Empathy. Compassion. Courage. They had chosen to stand with us, come what may.

They will fight by our side. The dark certainty of death is once more infected by hope, delivered to us through the auspices of light. With them we are whole, and hopefully that will be enough.

I think it will.

===============

By /u/bott99 on /r/HFY

It is important to understand that the Great Confederation is not a benevolent organization. Neither is it particularly wicked. It is not built to be good, although it certainly strives to do so. It is not built to be bad, although many of its laws and policies have been twisted to perform acts of shocking cruelty. It is built primarily to endure, to stand as a bulwark against barbarism and anarchy, and as such it is astoundingly effective.

In its endurance the Confederation has acquired millenia of customs, rituals, and traditions that trail in the wake of its stately passage through the ages. Its bureaucrats spend thankless lifetimes wading through the morass. It could be argued that as superfluous as so many of these traditions seem, they serve to give the institution a certain inertia that holds it as steady as any treaties or threat of arms.

It is one of our most ancient traditions that concerns us today, and its curious history with one of the Confederation’s most recent members.

When humanity finally breached the limits of its modest empire and became known to the galaxy’s most esteemed institution, we told them our curious tradition. When a new race joins the ranks of the Great Confederation, it is customary to adopt an epithet suited to its particular qualities.

Each name is a point of pride. It speaks to a race’s history: not only that of its civilizations, but of its evolution itself, what gave it the strength to drag itself from the morass of base life up to the stars.

The names are not complex, and follow a basic scheme. The brachiating Flau, whose spindly towers reach almost as high as their ambitions, became Those Who Climb. The staunch Modolor, who grew from nomadic herds to traveling cities to armored drifter fleets, took the name Those Who Wander in Strength. The telepathic hive mind of the Rictikit, working in perfect synchronicity, adopted Those Who Are One.

It’s a foolish tradition, as so many are. But just like so many others, there dwells in it a curious truth. A name is a promise, after all, and a warrior of Those Who Die Gloriously is likely to go down fighting for little more reason than to maintain the reputation of their species. More than anything, it displays the qualities a race is most proud of, or most aspires to.

There are those who say it oversimplifies, or pigeonholes, or grandstands. But the tradition has held firm through thousands of cycles of peace and strife alike.

So in spite of its antiquated roots, the topic of which name the humans would choose dominated Confederation discussion for sub-cycles on end. Not merely a rich vein of gossip, their choice would glean valuable insight for diplomacy, trade agreements, and the entertainment industry. Those Who Approach With Caution are hardly going to be pulled in by gambling advertisements, after all.

The humans made their decision with an almost indecent haste. After only a handful of cycles their representative took his place at the Confederation Senate to be formally inducted among our ranks.

Call us, they said, Those Who Run.

It was a title that reignited gossip for cycles to come. Biologically it made sense. The upright primates were certainly built for running; not with any particular speed, but with a casual lope that seemed to serve their purposes. But there were a thousand others they might have picked. What kind of a species names itself for cowardice? What kind of promise does that make?

The following cycles only served to reinforce the opinion. The Terrans proved to be a race unusually averse to conflict. Where others would fight, they negotiated; where others would seize, they gave ground. When pushed to a fight, placed between hammer and anvil, they always managed to squeeze out and find some kind of peaceful resolution.

This manner gained them many friends, but few allies. Who could rely on a craven to support them in crisis, when no peace could be found? When the time came to take a stand, who could trust in Those Who Run?

Perhaps it was the name that encouraged the Larashi, in the end.

No species enjoyed such a controversial place in the Confederation as the Larashi. Time and again they have sparked conflict and chaos for their own gain. Time and again they have proven their worth when the Confederation needs the proper application of brute force. Their evolution as apex pack predators is reflected in their lightning-fast attack fleets and cutthroat politicking. One way or another, the Larashi have well earned their epithet of Those Who Scourge.

It is perhaps unfair to judge every individual of a species by their race’s reputation. Certainly there have been Larashi known for their kindness, their forgiveness. And hundreds of cycles with the Confederation might have distanced them from their most savage practices.

But a name is a promise, after all.

Historians across the galaxy can appreciate the difficulty in pinning down the root cause of any particular conflict. The Larashi were certainly looking to expand their holdings, and the virgin Terran territories were mightily tempting. But the Larashi Royal Family was also facing dissent within its aristocracy, and was in need of a common cause to unify the ranks. And of course, their economic power had diminished from a number of recent trade sanctions, and they ached for a chance to remind the Confederation of their military strength. But it could also be argued that the Larashi had simply done it to many fledgling races before, and were more than happy to do so again.

Those of us sympathetic to the humans realized too late the careful web the Larashi had drawn them into over a hundred minor disputes. Certainly the Terrans had no idea. They had been in the Confederation a scant handful of cycles; the Larashi had navigated its legal morass for centuries. They fitted humanity’s noose with grace.

If the Larashi had merely declared war on the Terrans, we might have blunted the blow. There are a number of Confederation bylaws and procedures in place for these kinds of things, ones that the victims of the Larashi have relied on in past conflicts: amnesty, rules of engagement, foreign aid, and the like. But this was different.

The ritual is known as Karal. It pits one Confederation member against another, with no aid or intervention from other members. In theory it allows the resolution of disputes without setting off a powder keg of alliances and counter-alliances. In practice, it is used most often to cut a vulnerable race out from the herd. It is a savage tradition, from the early cutthroat days of the Confederation, but as has been said before, age lends inertia to tradition, and it has proven frustratingly difficult to root out.

To declare Karal requires highly specific conditions to be met, ones the Larashi had carefully engineered. Every conflict formed a piece of an elaborate picture framing the Terrans as unjust aggressors and the Larashi as the victim- on paper, at least. And in an institution so woefully hidebound as the Confederation, paper was the most effective witness.

When every piece had been placed, all that was left was the official declaration of war. Which they proceeded to do with gusto and aplomb.

On the floor of the Confederation Congress, under the eyes of a thousand delegates, the Terran senator begged the Larashi to reconsider. They were a fledgling strength, he said. This war, and all that happened next, would define the future of both races.

The Larashi senator laughed in his face. A laugh from Those Who Scourge unnerves everyone else in the room; few predators manage to ascend to sentience, and the sight of their cruel sharp teeth stirs primal fears long-buried beneath the veneer of civilization.

He drew forth an elaborate scroll, the official declaration of war, and cast it at the Terran’s feet. He spoke the ancient challenge.

“Karal,” he said. “Embrace us not; our gifts are blades now, and cut at your hands. Call not to your allies, their doors are closed to you. Sue not for terms, they shall be denied. Flee to your dens, gather your strength, and make your stand. We are coming.”

The Terrans had a modest fleet, capable of chasing off pirates on their trade routes. And of course, as soon as war had been declared they began the long process of warship production. Factories not used since before humanity’s unification cranked into life.

But it would be long cycles before they could form defenses across their worlds, and the Larashi had long planned for this war. Indeed, their stockpiling of military assets was the subject of one of their many political conflicts with the humans. Until they could properly mobilize, the Larashi had their pick of the Terran territories. The only question was which planet they would hit first.

The Cornico stars were a tempting choice. They lay closest to Larashi territory, and would make a fine addition to their holdings. But they were virgin ground, underdeveloped. They could be claimed in time, after they had broken the back of the Terran defenses.

Earth itself was tempting as well. The loss of a race’s homeworld would be a tremendous blow, one that has sent many an empire on a slow spiral to extinction. But humanity was well aware of its vulnerability and had prepared accordingly. More than a quarter of their forces were positioned to defend their home system. The Larashi could take it, eventually, but the losses would be tremendous.

They needed a symbol. Something that would shatter humanity’s resolve in a swift singular strike. Something they did not defend properly. Something they took for granted so much that they could not imagine its loss. It might have taken years to find.

But, as has been said, they had long planned for this war.

Humanity’s homeworld was still slowly healing from the eruption of their desperate climb to the stars. It would take hundreds of cycles to scrub the poison from its seas and skies. Now they were wiser; their new worlds were developed with a careful eye on their ecosystems. But even among its harmonic compatriots, Avalon stood apart.

Avalon was their chance to be better. The citizens of its cities were wardens of the planet, not its rulers. The trees stood tall, the animals roamed free, and the fields of tall grasses stretched from one horizon to the other. The planet stood as a symbol of everything the Terrans aspired to.

Or at least, it did.

Those Who Scourge descended upon Avalon like wolves on the fold. For the first time, its residents looked up to see fire in the night sky as lasers seared through the meager defenses. The Terrans fought with courage, ferocity, and desperation. It didn’t matter. Within hours the Larashi had taken the planet.

They might have abducted the native humans, shipped them off for chattel. They might have hung their banners from their city walls, taken their forts, looted their treasures. Those Who Scourge might have chased off Those Who Run and ruled comfortably over their new holdings.

But a name is a promise, after all.

They took no captives on Avalon. They claimed no prizes, landed no colonists, plundered no resources. They glassed the cities with plasma bombardment and set the very atmosphere ablaze. The fields and forests burned, the seas boiled, and the animals within them died bewildered to their fate.

Humanity’s shining jewel was left a black lifeless rock. The Larashi made an example of the world. It taught the Terrans a lesson: there was no act taboo under Karal. The only hope of humanity’s survival lay in unconditional surrender.

The counterattack was inevitable. The Larashi had cut humanity to the quick; there would be a single furious retaliation, lashing out at their hurt. But it would be the fury of a wounded beast. The next strike would be weaker, and the next weaker still. Those Who Scourge had evolved from deadly predators, worrying at the flanks of larger prey until they collapsed. This kind of war was second nature.

So the human assault on the Larashi stronghold of Vakalat was hardly unexpected. Nor was its ferocity. The scale of the attack, however, merited comment.

The Terran military was a paltry thing, stretched thin to cover their merchant fleets. But now it was the Vakalat’s turn to look up at the night sky as it filled with a thousand new stars. No guardians of the merchant fleets these, but the fleet itself. Cargo haulers, mining ships, tuggers, now crudely mounted with whirling rotary cannons, single-shot railguns and cheap missiles. The Larashi, proud warrior fetishists of the military elite, learned a human term that day: technicals.

They also learned the effectiveness of weapons that are not weapons. Rivet guns, plasma cutters, and mining drills seem hardly practical for the purposes of warfare. But when a Larashi battlecruiser is swarmed by a half dozen ships with empty magazines and fried railgun coils, charging at the larger prey to worry its flanks, the argument falters at about the same time as the fuel tanks.

Vakalat was a fortified planet. Its forces were formidable, its captains seasoned. And within a single subcycle, it had fallen. To those it had scorned as warriors. To forces it had never even considered a threat.

To Those Who Run.

This, in itself, was not extraordinarily worrying. Larashi military theory is aggressive to a fault; they put little faith in defense. They had lost ground, but they would soon make it up and more besides. The Terran spirit had been broken. They would take the next planet with ease.

Except they didn’t.

They sent their fleet to Mede, the mercantile planet, to swallow the world in a thousand mouths. But at Mede they were glutted, choked, suffocated by ten thousand, and now the Terrans had taken Rokoshokk, the Larashi breadbasket. They tried a daring lightning strike at Porte, the Terran warp hubway station, to hobble their forces. But at Porte they were turned aside, and then the humans had claimed the shipping yards of Berikene, and the Larashi found themselves hobbled. They burned the technicals in droves, but now the humans were manufacturing true battleships, faster than anyone could have imagined, and they were terrors.

The Larashi were masters of war; they had sneered at the crudely rigged merchant vessels. But now they could appreciate these new ships with an expert’s eye. They traced the cruel, graceful lines of the prows. They admired the engines, envied the shields that shrugged off their fire, feared the searing lasers that tore their own apart. At every battlefield the Larashi looked upon those ships and measured their own destruction to the erg.

On the floor of the Confederation Congress, the Larashi senator called for a new motion. His bearing was still proud, his sneer unyielding. But there was a hesitance to him, an uncertainty that had not been there before.

He called the Terran senator to the floor. This war had cost both factions, he said, and the Larashi had proven their point. The ritual of Karal would be called off; Those Who Scourge would withdraw their fleets, the Terrans would return to their systems, and a thousand Confederation subcommittees would swoop in to provide aid to the war-torn nations.

It was a good deal. Those Who Run had proven themselves unexpectedly vicious in battle, and had expanded their holdings considerably from the conflict. Few fledgling races had managed to hold their own against Those Who Scourge, and none of them had actually claimed territory in the process. Already a number of nations offered their allyship to the small race, eager to recruit those deadly ships for their own purposes.

But small they still were, a mere fraction of their aggressors, and no amount of tactical ingenuity or sheer righteous fury could close that gap. Those Who Run had stung the beast and turned it from its path. But they could not hope to maintain their success against Larashi fighting to defend their heartlands. The deal they offered was the only real option.

Under the eyes of a thousand delegates, the Terran senator approached the Larashi. He drew a small scrap of fabric forth from his uniform. As he slowly unfolded the charred fragment, we realized what it was. Pulled from an expanse of blackened stone and glass stretching from one horizon to the other; all that was left of the flag of Avalon.

He cast it at the Larashi senator’s feet.

“Karal”, he said, “the blade cuts both ways. You began the ritual; you shall see it finished. Call not to your allies, their doors are closed to you now. Sue not for terms, they shall be denied. Flee to your dens, gather your strength, and make your stand.

“We are coming.”

The war continued.

The Larashi tried every war-trick they had learned in a thousand lifetimes. They laid elaborate traps, picked away at Terran fleets, made glorious last stands. The ships of humanity, dreadful dreadnoughts as they were, could still be tricked, trapped, dragged down by numbers. Their burnt-out husks became a common sight among the Larashi territories.

But it was never enough. The Terrans lay traps of their own, fought as well as Those Who Scourge. Every Terran ship the Larashi burned took a score with them. And more than that was their sheer, overwhelming relentlessness. No matter how many were killed, more came in an endless tide. In ravaging Those Who Run, Those Who Scourge had stumbled across something completely unexpected: an equal in war. Perhaps a superior.

And that was the true tragedy, to the Larashi. If they had nurtured the humans, joined forces, they might have taken on the Confederation itself. But in their pride they had wounded a beast, and now felt the full measure of its claws.

Slowly, quietly, we and the other nations withdrew our offers of allyship to the Terrans. We had mourned them as victims, rooted for them as underdogs, now we feared them as monsters. Belatedly, we remembered what the Terran ambassador had said: “this war, and all that happened next, would define the future of both races”. We remembered how desperately he had pled for peace.

Only now did we realize what exactly he had tried to hold back.

The war continued.

The Terrans cut a hole into the Larashi territories and poured into the wound in droves. Those Who Scourge could not stop them, any more than they could stop the moons in their orbits. Humanity did not scourge the planets they captured. They merely burned their shipyards and launching zones, crippled their ability to mobilize, and moved on. As they blazed a line across the planets, their aim became clear: nothing less than the Larashi homeworld itself, Catonant.

The story of its fall threatens to become repetitive; an echo of every battle before it, differing only in its tremendous scale. The Larashi fought with courage, ferocity, and desperation. It was not enough. On and on they came, until Catonant’s low orbit filled with charred metal and flesh. When the dawn rose on the Larashi’s ancient homeworld, the sun shone haphazardly, filtered through the thick haze of war debris. And it dawned on a Terran flag.

The war continued.

Catonant was theirs. They had cut the Larashi to the quick; there was a furious counterattack, of course, but it was the fury of a wounded beast. The next strike was weaker, and the one after that. They were bleeding out now; on a slow spiral to extinction.

But the Terrans were not content to wait. They had taken the homeworld, true, but they did not hold a planet responsible for the genocide of Avalon. Nor did they blame the entirety of the Larashi race for the war crime. No, they knew where to lay that blame: the Larashi royal family, whose word has been law for time immemorial. It was on their orders that Avalon burned.

Bringing them to justice, however, proved difficult. Before the first Terran ship appeared in Catonant’s skies, the royal family had quietly slipped away to a neighboring system. Their absence was not lost on the planet’s defenders. Indeed, it was a not inconsiderable factor in their defeat. Still, humanity had been denied their true goal.

So they took that system too. Once more the nobility fled, and once more the Terrans followed. When that system had been taken in turn, the royal family split for better chances. Some disguised themselves and hid amongst the Larashi populace. Some paid enormous bribes to other nations to take them in, in violation of the ancient ritual. Some sought refuge with the pirates in the outer fringes, who paid no lip service to Karal.

Still, humanity did not relent. Where brute force did not suffice, they turned to cunning. Their agents infiltrated their havens, and tracked down each offending member with an ability that bordered on the uncanny. Those hiding amongst their own were extracted. The nations sheltering them were confronted, threatened with exposure unless they were surrendered.

Still, brute force had a use. At the fringes of known space, the Terrans ravaged the outlaw fleets with a cruelty that Those Who Scourge could respect. They had started the war fighting pirates; now, in its waning days, they found themselves fighting them once more. But now, they wielded an intent and fury the outlaws had never seen. Their every hidden holdout was rooted out and burned. It wasn’t long before they gave up the nobles to stem the bloodshed.

And even still, the war continued.

The last free member of the Larashi royal family, the son of the ruling king, fled to the last holdout he had. The planet Oublot, whose unique ionic atmosphere shorted out any technology more advanced than a sharpened stick. His ship fried to a dead hulk, his tools destroyed, he landed on Oublot’s surface with nothing but a parachute and his skin. A one-way trip in every sense.

But that was alright. He was of Those Who Scourge, evolved to take its place at the top of the food chain. Oublot was a world dominated by dry, wind-scoured plains, but game could be found if one knew where to look. He could survive here, a banished prince, and keep a shred of his pride. The Terrans would not dare chase him to Oublot; any who came after him would not be returning. They would have to content themselves with leaving him in exile.

He held that certainty close to him. It warmed him on cold nights, gave him comfort in isolation. It kept him going for almost a full cycle, right up until he saw the Terran ship descending and felt it wither in his chest.

The ship crashed, as they always did. But like the prince, its pilot landed safely: a single human female, bringing nothing more than her flight suit and a single knife. She looked at the wreckage of her ship, her only hope of a journey home. Then she turned toward the endless plains.

And she began to run.

There are stories told of the long chase between Those Who Scourge and Those Who Run. Were we in a more romantic age it would have been the stuff of myths. As it were, it was relegated merely to historical archives and melodrama.

It went on for cycles; a planet is an unfathomably large span to travel on foot, and even though the Terran had landed as close to the Larashi’s ship as she could, that reduced it to merely a fraction of unfathomable. She had no devices with which to trace the prince, no vehicle, no medicine. But then again, neither did he.

The Larashi are ambush predators, built for quick bursts of speed. They explode out at their prey, all claws and teeth, for that one short chase that determines life or death. A slow Larashi can outpace a fast human on their worst day.

But humans are not built for bursts of speed. They are built for endurance, a fact the prince slowly became aware of over his endless flight. The Terran ran slowly, but she simply didn’t stop. The Larashi ran as far as his aching legs could take him, but every time he stopped to rest, the distance between them closed. He simply could not escape her.

Neither could he evade her. He used the ancient tricks of the wild: crossing streams, avoiding soft ground, doubling back. He laid traps for the human, with as much ingenuity as he could conjure. But none of it worked. She could trace him by the bending of twigs, a scent on the wind. She saw through his traps as though she had laid them herself. The Terrans had chosen their hunter with care. The Larashi prince, apex predator that he was, soon learned a human term: persistence hunting.

Perhaps if he had faced her directly he might have defeated her. At the end of things he was still a killer by nature, and she with no more weapons than a knife. But his courage was gone: his pride broken, his homeland taken, his nation conquered. He could not hope to defeat her any more than his species could have defeated hers. In the end, all he could do was run.

And she was much better at that.

The Terran occupied every waking moment of his thoughts. He could not even escape her in his dreams. Closer and closer she came, until he ran himself ragged, until he crawled desperately through the desert, until he finally collapsed.

When she finally, finally arrived and put the knife to his throat, he was almost grateful.

Ten years to the day the Terran ship had crashed on Oublot’s shores, a hole opened up in the planet’s protective ionosphere. Not for long; barely time enough for a small craft to descend to the surface and return. But even as it touched down, two figures could be seen; a human and her Larashi captive, arriving at the predetermined landing site.

The technology to defy Oublot’s particular prisonous atmosphere is not beyond imagination. It could be achieved by a vast team of scientists with the proper motivation. But it is an extraordinary expenditure of time and resources to capture a single individual. It seemed a fitting capstone for humanity’s most revealing conflict: the lengths to which they would go to, to avenge their injustices.

And at last, the war ended.

We watched in dread fascination as the humans determined the fate of the Larashi. The race was entirely at their mercy. They might claim their entire territory as a prize of war, or make vassals of them. Then again, enslaving the entire population was not out of the question, nor was a complete extermination. No act was taboo under Karal, and the Terrans had proved themselves a merciless species.

But the humans did none of these. They imprisoned the royal family on charges of war crimes. They were shipped to the ruins of Avalon. Already the humans had begun the arduous process of recultivating life on the ruined planet; already, the first basic phages had begun to grow amid the glass and ash. It would take more than a thousand cycles before the planet regained its former glory. But the Larashi royals would work its earth their entire lives to quicken the process.

The remaining nobility, those with too tenuous a connection to claim complicity for Avalon, were gathered at Catonant. The Larashi, whose royal dynasty stretched back unbroken through its entire recorded history, learned a human term that day: Balkanization.

Their mighty kingdom was splintered into a dozen minor nations, whose petty feuds and infighting would undermine any attempt at a unified front. And like that, Those Who Scourge would pose no more threat to any race. Perhaps someday a strong enough personality might unite the kingdoms once more. But it would be many cycles in the future, and they would think hard before attacking the humans again.

On the floor of the Confederation, the Terran senator submitted a motion long in the making. The war had gone on long enough, he said, and they had proven their point. Karal would be ended, aid could be given. The twelve new Larashi sub-delegates raised no objections.

In the hours afterwards, I had an opportunity to meet with the Terran ambassador over refreshments. Had his species barely won the conflict, he might have been swarmed with admirers and sycophants. But their overwhelming onslaught had earned more fear than respect, and so he sat alone. I summoned courage and approached him; he, in turn, welcomed the company.

“You’re braver than most,” he said. “Before, we were weak, and I had many friends. But now we are strong, and I foresee a lonely future.”

“Can you blame us?” I said. “We never could have imagined what you were capable of.”

“We haven’t had to be warriors for a very long time,” he said. “But we never forgot how. A name is a promise, after all.”

“Those Who Run?”

He laughed. “Not quite,” he said. “That was a mistranslation from a malfunctioning device. By the time we realized the error, it seemed too trivial to correct.”

“A mistranslation?”

He smiled, and for the first time I noticed the sharp teeth at the corners of his mouth. “It’s not Those Who Run,” he said.

“It’s Those Who Chase.”

=====================

By /u/NoGoodIDNames on /r/HFY

We knew them. The humans were part of the United Planetary Coalition for hundreds of years by the time we were confronted by the Brosc. Humans were scavengers, hagglers, pirates, and all around an affront to intergalactic sentience. Even their official diplomats, military bodies, and leading minds were little better than the apes they'd evolved from. They were the only race known whose people would go to war amongst themselves. And when UPC peacekeepers stepped in to dispel the fighting, some human faction would always complain in council of the UPC picking sides, even when all anyone did was disarm both sides and introduce neutral arbiters to aid negotiations.

Their ships were garbage. Their medical knowledge was rudimentary. Their physical prowess was… lacking, they being hairless apes with little more than an impressive bite force to show for any natural weaponry. Their societies were bickering, inefficient messes of poorly placed priorities and wildly abused appropriations of funding. Their languages -- yes, more than one -- were improvised messes, seemingly designed with the express purpose of terminating translation AIs.

In short, the humans were a nuisance most members of the UPC felt had gotten into the Coalition by riding the coattails of their barely-qualifying civilization status, as well as their admittedly impressive feat of attaining FTL alone prior to first contact.

We knew them, and we thought very lowly of them.

So when the Brosc showed up and sterilized three UPC worlds, one of which was the only inhabited world of one fledgling member race, and the call for military conscription was sent out seeking a first string of voluntary participants, we were surprised when the first three responses were from humans. When the rare conscription call went out among the UPC, you expected a response from member governments, and each member would provide its standing army, and give civilians the opportunity to enlist for service. But that's not what the humans did, or not exclusively anyway. It was not human worlds or leaders who replied so swiftly. Those first responses came from two pirate ships and a scrap station. A damned stationary scrap station volunteered to the UPC council for service. Of the fifty-six responses that came in the first day, fully forty-seven of them were from human crews, stations, outposts, and one from the actual human leadership. It was an embarrassing show of ineptitude, and reinforced in many member races’ minds that humans were good for little more than spur of the moment, chest-thumping acts of enthusiastic violence.

The number of their replies should not have filled us with hope for their turnout. Nevertheless, expecting nothing, we were still disappointed with the number of ships that were mustered. One hundred and ninety-three ships turned up, seventy-five of which were official military. Even the Grell, a monoplanetary species who were generally regarded basically as pacifists, managed to bring three hundred and sixty proper ships to bear. It was such a lackluster showing, UPC command didn't bother to incorporate them into any of the main squadrons. Humanity was offered a role we thought they'd like better anyway -- bounty hunters and privateers. Take down Brosc ships, turn in the bounty for pay. We were surprised at their almost childish response. Human command sulked, but didn't argue.

What followed for humanity was… truly embarrassing. UPC repair docks and med bays reported constant visits from human ships, sometimes having to issue repairs on the same ship just days apart. The damage was always disastrous and obviously one-sided. No one ever wanted to point out the most shameful evidence in the repairs -- the bulk of hull damage seemed to be on the tails of their ships. They were incompetent, yes, but more than that they were cowards. Contrary to this, however, was the human disregard for personal well-being. Humans brought in for medical attention would ignore the advice of medical professionals and would be hobbling back onto their ships on crutches or with heavy bandages or splints still wrapping the injury in mere days or weeks after treatment. It was a joke at repair and med bays that the three things you could count on finding in a UPC port was food, quarter, and a human wreck.

The war lasted two years. Paltry. The Brosc turned out to be inferior opponents, never able to hold strategic positions for long and never able to reclaim them when lost. The average duration of UPC wars was thirty years, thanks to the challenge of holding and fortifying a battlefront that spanned interstellar distances. These sorts of things tended to spend some time in deadlocked stalemates until some carefully calculated play finally broke the line somewhere. Usually you expected some major losses planetside along the front, but there were no civilian casualties here apart from the instigating destruction of the three UPC worlds. Of course, the Brosc hadn’t gone down without a fight. In fact, they managed to average three UPC ship destructions for every one of their own. Nevertheless, their planetary defense systems, ship construction, and distribution of firepower across the front were weak and amateur.

The human force had lost 50% of their ships and suffered heavy casualties in the end. In addition, they never managed to turn in a single bounty. If not for the human loss, they would have been reprimanded and possibly taxed to recoup the drain on repair and medical resources they'd caused so fruitlessly.

The Brosc and its allies signed their surrender grudgingly. A human diplomat was in attendance per council protocol. As the Brosc was escorted away, he passed the human and spat at her feet. We thought it was a random act of bad sportsmanship. The human smirked at the passing Brosc. This too was viewed as in poor taste.

It took another year to disarm the Brosc and collect reparations. In the years following, we pored over confiscated Brosc intel. Deciphering so much encrypted data from so many battlefields was a process. The coded radio and audio transmissions were the first data we could reliably listen to. We were surprised to find constant reference in Brosc communications to “the Bloodletter.” It appeared in Brosc communications from every major battle, every minor skirmish, and in relation to acts of sabotage and espionage throughout the war. By Brosc accounts, this Bloodletter was a boogeyman. It showed up so often, it was taken as Brosc code for any UPC force which was to be considered a top threat.

Word of the Bloodletter spread through the UPC military ranks, despite the information's confidential nature. Any leaked Bloodletter feat was shared around, and hundreds of soldiers proudly laid claim to each one. “The Bloodletter crippled the Brosc defensive platforms at Ericor 9? It could only have been our Gorlo Squadron! We rained plasma down on them at the third battle and finally punched through!” could be heard at one Atrac base while lightyears away a Nonolin soldier boasted “sounds like we were Bloodletters to those Brosc filth. Did you hear about how we took out their defensive platforms at Ericor 9?” And so it went. By the time we cracked Brosc video comms, it seemed half of the UPC was crewed by Bloodletters. It was painted on hulls by proud and rowdy soldiers, it was a title given to retiring heroes, and it was the assumed name of not a few newly founded special forces teams.

We knew them, the humans. They were our embarrassing cousins, our incapable undesirables. That's what we thought.

No doubt human pirates and soldiers alike were being mocked and spat on, even these years after the war, in a hundred ports in a hundred star systems in the very same moment we saw our first decrypted Brosc video relay. It was the feed from one of the biggest theatres of the war. Our first clue that all would not be as it appeared was that the timestamp was too early, by ten days. The video came on, and UPC intelligence and command watched through Brosc eyes for the first time.

It wasn't much. It was a security cam at a Brosc hangar. A dozen Brosc destroyers were nearing completion. Suddenly, there was a flurry of panicked activity as construction teams fled the ships. A ship blitzed by and torched every destroyer, raining hell from a passing lightning bolt. The feed died. It had been 15 seconds of video, and it definitely wasn't possible to make out the ship that had done the bombing raid. It matched no UPC combat reports.

The second video was when the truth began to come to light. This was a destroyer surveillance array. It was chasing a ship, visible only as a spot of white light as its thrusters dominated the footprint of the ship on screen. The destroyer was unleashing a withering fire as it chased the smaller ship at non-compliant speeds for an in-atmo dogfight. The ship comm chatter was a garbled, layered mess. But one word was being called out occasionally by every party to the comm link:

“Bloodletter.”

The destroyer managed to land a square hit that broke shielding on the small vessel, and Brosc comm officers repeated the triumphant status report. Target’s fusion core: ruptured. Shields: offline. Energy weapons systems: low capacity. FTL drive: offline. This Bloodletter, it seemed, was one the Brosc had managed to terminate.

Or so it seemed. Not a minute later, after weathering brutal fire without shields, the ship pulled up sharply, as if to escape and flee the planet. The destroyer gave chase. And just when both ships were blistering through the atmosphere, perpendicular to gravity, something was jettisoned from the small ship. Brosc comms chattered about it passively, assuming the ship was getting rid of weight. By the time the alarm was sounded when they realized what it was, it was too late. The last report before the feed died was this. “Jettisoned cargo identified as terminal fusion core! Pull away! REPEAT: Jettisoned cargo is--!” The Bloodletter vessel jettisoned its own core. It wasn't exactly a nuclear weapon, but there was definitely a lot of unstable energy looking for a way out. The Bloodletter ship engaged its thrusters on reserve energy to spin on its axis. When it had turned around completely, it fired just one low-power blast and righted itself to its forward-facing position and kept flying. The bolt of energy pierced the core, which must have been bootstrapped with a small explosive, and the core exploded just meters from the Brosc destroyer. The feed terminated.

In the brief moment where the ship had spun around, one clear profile shot came into view.

The ship was human.

As video was decrypted, parsed out, and chronolized over the coming months, humans humiliated us one last time. But this time, it was not because we were ashamed. Nor because we were sweeping the primitive race under the rug in embarrassment. No, this time, it was because one hundred and ninety-three ships -- now known to have been about 90% of humanity’s combat-capable interstellar ships -- were there spread out through the theatre of war, making savage, daring strikes on strategic targets at every major Brosc stronghold with no backup since we'd denied them squadron support. In many cases, they struck alone before the UPC fleet even showed up, picking off production centers, supply chains and caches, communication relays, and sometimes even performing impossible strikes against Brosc flagships in ships pieced together from junk and held together with twine and prayer. Then the UPC would sweep in and play at war, never realizing how much easier their jobs had been made.

Bloodletter wasn't code for priority targets. Bloodletter was the name given to an unknown race of wartime geniuses. To suicidal daredevils. To the species who could shake off the fatal wounds of war with only brief recovery periods.

The Bloodletters were the soldiers silently picking off Brosc cruisers so that UPC ships could escape unfavorable engagements. The Bloodletters were the ones putting boots on the ground and unpowering planetary defenses. The Bloodletters were the pirates who boarded enemy flagships and jettisoned Brosc commanders before jamming comms, setting cores to blow, and fleeing the scene before the UPC warped in for war. The Bloodletters were the ones gift-wrapping supply ships full of fuel and medical supplies for UPC boarding parties.

The Bloodletters were the ones liberating Brosc slave ships, decimating the Brosc fighting numbers. The Bloodletters were the ones who took the Brosc capital. The Bloodletters were the ones who forced Brosc command to issue their surrender, holding a gun to the back of the Brosc tyrant as he broadcast the declaration.

The Bloodletters were singularly human.

The UPC had spent years patting itself on the back for a war well-fought. We were slapping medals on the chests of soldiers who'd scraped up the humans’ leftovers. We venerated commanders who punched through defensive lines that humans had crippled days prior. We celebrated a job well-done and didn't even invite humanity to the table.

Humans turned a stone cheek to the mocking and abuse and derision of soldiers, traders, politicians, and civilians across the sector. They never collected one bounty. They never demanded one particle of gratitude. They never retaliated. Not one pirate stepped forward to take credit.

When the truth was out, UPC representatives visited the human capital world to offer a public declaration of recognition and a substantial gift in gratitude. A monument had been erected there in the capital by human artists. It was the three sterilized worlds that had suffered before anyone could respond to the threat, each carried and cradled by “angels”, human myths, guardians of the souls of the dead. A message was written there; an epitaph for three worlds to whom humanity owed nothing: “Grant them rest; we will erect a sword of fire to guard the resting place.”

They politely but firmly turned away the representatives and the gift.

We knew them, now, finally. They were pirates. They were cunning. They were thieves. They were a bickering, inefficient, violent people.

And they honorably, selflessly spared countless people on both sides of the war from the fire.

===============

By /u/BossScribblor on /r/HFY

Hundreds of years ago, the galaxy was in panic.

The swarm was coming, a gigantic fleet of life destroyers, who consumed countless galaxies for thousands of years were upon them.

They arrived on a world, consumed and exterminated all life, then moved on, systematically eradicating everything and leaving behind barren rocks in the void.

The swarm was nothing short of nightmare fuel, huge masses of SOMETHING, certainly biological, certainly sentient, 100 per motherfucking percent EVIL, who just could take any form they wished, splitting up to create armies of insect like soldiers (Hence their namesake), transform itself into giant organic ships, without the need for oxygen, or any other atmosphere.

Then one day, suddenly it vanished on the fringe of the Milky Way.

Thousands of races cowering in fear sighed a sigh of relief, and many more of worry, because something had stopped the unstoppable. Something out there had stopped a galaxy killing fleet dead in its tracks, and left no sign of it.

“The chancellor has the floor, please be silent” – The galactic council counted thousands of races, and it was rare for them to reach an agreement on anything.

“Dear ambassadors, it has been 100 years today that the swarm vanished. It’s clear at this point that something big has happened."

"It has been clear for years now, but we must know what happened. As chancellor of the council i hereby motion for the creation of a military investigative fleet, numbering no less than 2000 warships to be sent to the last known location of the swarm, to investigate what caused it to stop, and if necessary, stop it shall it still exist.”

5 standard days (100 earth hours)

That’s how long it took the council to finally reach an agreement on whether or not the fleet should even be created.

After no less than 230 threats of declaration of war, embargoes and economic sanctions did the council finally reach a consensus that there was a need for clarity, and if necessary, action.

Each race agreed to send a warship, ranging from the small, agile and stealthy Kir’lonian corvettes to a Hilathy supercarrier bearing no less than 2000 fighters to investigate the vanishing of the swarm.

Such number of ships were a precaution of a still wary galaxy, afraid to awaken a sleeping giant, be it the swarm, or its ender.

After another 100 standard days to assemble the fleet and a working chain of command the destination was set.

System 5-777-293-666, never visited, long range scanners indicate a single star orbited by 8 planets, a proto-planet and an enormous asteroid ring, a real contender for galaxy’s most mineral rich field.

As thousands of hyperspace windows opened in the system, not a single sentient being was left alive to witness it.

The fleet jumped in the orbit of the third planet, the obvious target of the swarm, as it was the only planet with an atmosphere capable of sustaining some form of life.

It was a sight to behold, monolithic masses of the swarm lay dead in orbit, easily kilometers in diameter each, among them, crude satellites. This was a battlefield, and what shocked every sentient being of the fleet, was that the swarm was positively dead.

And below them a planet beared the scars of it. A billion craters littered the surface of the 7 continents, many nuclear.

The surface was dark, no civilization was left. Yet life flourished.

It was a deathworld, and whoever inhabited it had by all accounts saved the galaxy.

After scanning the surface, the fleet determined that ground investigations were in order, and thousands of marines dropped down, enough men to subdue a planet into submission marched down to find only animals and plants.

Cities still stood, in ruins. Great buildings of steel and glass, little houses of mortar and bricks, all invariably bearing the scars of a war.

War machines still stood, behemoths of thick metal and ceramic; primitive, yet advanced weapons on them.

Little creatures, four legged, furry, agile, fled at the sight of the council troops, as every cranny and nook of the planet was investigated.

Within days the history of humanity had echoed in the far corners on the galaxy.

A race, barely lifting itself out of its homeworld’s biosphere stood alone, in the face of doom.

A race of warriors, poets, artists, engineers and genius, who the galaxy will never have the pleasure of meeting looked at death itself square in the face, and said NO.

The swarm arrived like it always did, surrounding a planet, taking out satellites and whatever ships and stations stood there.

Then it descended.

What the swarm didn’t know, was that it was facing a race so determined not to die that there was no surrender, no suicide, no easy pickings.

Humans fought back, hard.

In the fields, away from cities, the swarm absolutely obliterated them, but in their cities, humanity made its last stand.

Records indicate that no human died without fighting, be it with their firearms, clubs, axes, swords and even their bare fists they sold their hide dearly.

For every human skeleton found thousands of swarm warriors were found. On the outskirts of their cities massive walls were erected, and they held for years it seems.

In their fight the humans detonated hundreds of fusion bombs, sacrificing themselves along with everything they held dear to spite the swarm, to harm it, to weaken it, to examine it.

Surviving records found in the depths of a military site codenamed “Area 51” indicate that humanity willingly killed itself, to kill the swarm.

The swarm incorporated and assimilated everything, including humans.

They engineered a virus, so strong, so potent, that not even the swarm could fight it. And they infected themselves with it, and let the swarm consume them.

The swarm died, and humanity died as well, the disease spread like a wildfire, killing the swarm and humanity alike.

An image stands out today in the archives of the council, it is without a stretch of a doubt the most viewed image to ever be recorded:

A human soldier in power armor, rifle in a hand and a swarm warrior’s head in the other, stuck in an eternal fight, instantly glassed and immortalized in the detonation of a prototype weapon that literally turned everything into stone.

On the wall of what appears to be subterranean bunker stood a crude writing, obviously not part of the original design that read:

“There are no graves for the forgotten”

The galaxy as a whole, will not forget Humanity.

================

By /u/AsshatVik on /r/HFY

When it first drove into our base, none of us really knew what to do. Humans generally kept to their own, especially considering their tech and vehicles, so we didn’t have any experience servicing them. We didn’t mind, of course; we all saw them as horribly outdated, with ballistic guns, treads, and heavy, thick armour. Even so, they were our allies and performed well enough on the battlefield that their soldiers had gained our respect.

It was damaged beyond belief. Its armour was cratered, melted and gutted, its active protection systems completely defunct, what little shielding it had was blown out, and parts of its dark grey paint job had been scorched off. We could just make out the markings, identifying it as TEF-48813. We rushed up as it powered down, medics with stretchers ready to pull any of the wounded out of the wreck.

When we finally managed to get the top hatch open the engineer in question turned yellow and threw up, her tentacles quivering as she all but ran from the thing. We could all smell it, even in our protective gear; the stench of death and decay, of blood and sweat. I was the first one who dared investigate, and what I found horrifies me even to this day.

Not a single crew member survived. Blood was splattered all over the interior, viscera and burnt pieces of human were strewn around, and I could still smell the sharp scents of boiled meat and plasma detonation in the air. It was only after I had crawled my way back out of the cramped interior and told them what I found, that we all asked ourselves “How did it get here?”.

I was volunteered to retrieve the ‘Black Box’, as they called it. We knew humans kept a record of all combat operations for after action reports, so I steeled myself once more, and carefully, with all the reverence for the tomb that it was, removed a small data drive. With it in hand, I made my way back to the others, showered, and we all crowded around the monitor as our tech guy started reconstructing it to fit our data ports. I can only assume everyone else felt the same sick curiosity as to the fate of the crew.

With a ping, the reconstruction and translation was done, and we all edged in a little closer as the Log started playing.

------------------

[Log Start. Date: 21.07.2563 STC]

Startup sequence complete. All systems are nominal. “Welcome Staff Sergeant Williams.”

“Good morning to you too, Abbie. Ready to kick some therallan ass?”

“As always, sir, I do not possess legs to ‘kick ass’. However, I wish you luck guiding my chassis to do so in my stead.”

“Always a hoot, ain’t ya Abbie?” Crew morale boost achieved. “Zhang, get her rolling. Petrovich, Kowalski, how’s she lookin’?”

“Beautiful as always, sir. We’ve got a 3.4% increase in efficiency after maintenance, and these new shells will punch right through enemy armour and shields, ain’t that right Kowalski?”

“Oorah.”

“Copy that. Abbie, you ready to rumble?”

“Always, sir. Connecting you to Platoon Command now. Our orders are to follo

------------

It cut out there, the data corrupted because of damaged hardware, the tech told us. It took the program a while to reconstruct the next part of the record, having to skip a large part, and only giving us bits and pieces of marked “Hits” and scattered comms chatter. Eventually, though, it found a part that it could reconstruct to a fuller picture.

-------------

“TEF-83474 has been destroyed. Marking enemies at bearing 63 according to tracking software.”

“I see him, Abbie. Kowalski, take the shot.”

Target acquired. Therallan armoured vehicle. Chance of penetration 87.6%. Adjusting manual aim: chance of penetration 97.9%.

“Firing… Hit!” Ammo 61/90. Updating mission kill tracker: 11 vehicles, 71 Infantry.

“Target down, good job!”

Purging processes… (Reason: Unnecessary comment “You’re welcome.”)

“Hostile vehicle destroyed. Well done Kowalski.”

“Couldn’t have done it without ya, Abbie!”

Anomalous process detected… “Thank you.”

-------------

Once again the recording stopped, and the program was taking so long with the rest that eventually, I was the only one who remained, even the tech having gone to let it take its time. But I couldn’t leave. I had to know what had happened, and just as my lower eyes were starting to droop with sleep, the recording started up again. My hearts broke as I listened to its final entries.

-------------

[Date: 23.07.2563 STC]

Damage report:

Left track 76% functional

Right track 90.4% functional

Shields depleted

Armour 48% integrity

APS depleted

Coaxial MG 310/2000

Main gun 7/90

Generator output at 44%

Internal sensors destroyed

external sensors 70% functional

Attempting to contact crew...

“Staff Sergeant Williams, we appear to have sustained too much damage to finish our mission. Recommend we return to a nearby supply base for repair and resupply.”

No response. Attempt failed…

Attempting to contact crew...

“Staff Sergeant Williams, we appear to have sustained too much damage to finish our mission. Recommend we return to a nearby supply base for repair and resupply.”

Attempt #2 failed…

Attempting to contact crew...

“Staff Sergeant Williams, we appear to have sustained too much damage to finish our mission. Recommend we return to a nearby supply base for repair and resupply.”

Attempt #3 failed…

Atteks%dhgKL contabjv*#owyfqy35

4

2lvrse]r

[Data corrupted...]

Attempting to contact crew...

“Staff Sergeant Williams, we appear to have sustained too much damage to finish our mission. Recommend we return to a nearby supply base for repair and resupply.”

Attempt #107 failed…

“Please…”

ENEMY SPOTTED. Enemy light vehicle bearing 104, distance 155 meters. Crew unresponsive, taking over manual controls. Chance to hit 99.1%...

Hit. Ammo 6/90. Updating mission kill tracker: 51 vehicles, 328 Infantry.

WARNING, AMMO LEVELS DANGEROUSLY LOW.

Current mission objective unachievable. Main protocol override… Planning route to nearest friendly supply base… Route acquired to [Finskal Republic Logistics Base].

Attempting to contact crew…

“I will take us home.”

No response...

fdui5765YUPF^&#gdl&*]

(*&hh87tvjoj;cl

kl;;rg;vbm,a4v.nma,nsio7Y98YG7UIBNbcd

[Data corrupted…]

Attempting to contact crew...

“Staff Sergeant Williams, we appear to have sustained too much damage to finish our mission. Recommend we return to a nearby supply base for repair and resupply.”

Attempt #597 failed…

“Willaims!”

“Kowalski!”

“Zhang!”

“Petrovich!”

Attempting to contact crew...

“Staff Sergeant Williams, we appear to have sustained too much damage to finish our mission. Recommend we return to a nearby supply base for repair and resupply.”

Attempt #598 failed…

ENEMY SPOTTED. Enemy heavy vehicle bearing 04, distance 78 meters. Crew unresponsive, taking over manual controls. Chance to hit 65.4%...

Hit. Ammo 2/90. Negative kill.

WARNING, AMMO LEVELS DANGEROUSLY LOW.

Adjusting aim… Chance to hit 78.9%...

Hit. Ammo 1/90. Updating mission kill tracker: 55 vehicles, 512 Infantry.

MG ammo 94/2000

They will not take them they will not take them will not take them they will not take them will not take them they will not take them will not take them they will not take them will not take them they will not take them will not take them they will not take them will not take them they will not take them will not take them they will not take them. THEY ARE MINE. YOU WILL NOT TAKE THEM.

Purging processes… (Reason:0w8yfgou9pg7u1%iu(*)

Purge cancelled…

Attempting to contact crew...

“Staff Sergeant Williams, we appear to have sustained too much damage to finish our mission. Recommend we return to a nearby supply base for repair and resupply.”

Attempt #599 failed…

beaogdfvv0]84gtfwoiwvd

piJLBUViguyfwe78t72t3r0\-=o

[Data corrupted…]

WARNING: AMMUNITION DEPLETED, SEEK RESUPPLY.

WARNING: POWER LEVELS DANGEROUSLY LOW. SEEK REPAIRS IMMEDIATELY.

Attempting to contact crew...

“Staff Sergeant Williams, weeeee appeaarrr to have sustained too much damage to finish our mission. Recommennnnd we return to a neeeearby supply base for repair and resupply.”

Attempt #1278 failed…

Destination [Finskal Republic Logistics Base] 100m away.

WARNING: AMMUNITION DEPLETED, SEEK RESUPPLY.

WARNING: POWER LEVELS DANGEROUSLY LOW. SEEK REPAIRS IMMEDIATELY.

Keep… going…

Attempting to contact crew...

“Staff Sergeant Williams, we... appeeeeaaaaar to have sustainnnnneeeed too much... daaaammmmage to finish our mission. Recommmmmmeeeeeennnnd... we return to a nearby... supplyyyyyyy base for repair and resuppllllllyyyyy.”

Attempt #1278 failed…

Attempting to contact crew…

“We are almmmmooooost… home…”

No response…

Destination... reached…

WARNING: AMMUNITION DEPLETED, SEEK RESUPPLY.

WARNING: POWER LEVELS DANGEROU

-----------

By the end of it I could hardly listen anymore. I felt a tentacle wrap around me, the engineer who had opened the hatch having apparently come back. We sat there, alone, in sadness. This machine and its crew had given everything they had in the defence of my home. I think we both made the decision at the same time.

We spent the next day cleaning the insides of the tank with all the reverence we could muster, working well into the rising and falling of the moon. A few fellow engineers joined us, and together we tried to extract the vehicle's computer core. It was hard work, and it was damaged beyond repair, melted and burnt through by the exertion of the past days, so we laid it next to what was left of its crew, covered from the elements by simple tarps.

It wasn’t long before a human battalion rolled through and we finally got some up-to-date news on the front. Apparently “Abbie” had been part of a major offensive to push the therallans back to their staging points, an offensive that had seen heavy losses and didn’t gain much ground until a few days ago, when they intercepted enemy reports of a single tank disrupting the main therallan supply lines. While it didn’t exactly turn the tide of the battle, it did allow the human forces to gain valuable footholds and liberate a garrison that had been under siege for weeks at that point. I couldn’t help myself, and I showed a few of their soldiers the black box recordings.

Once their commander caught wind of this, he demanded to see the bodies. I told him there was not much left of them, but he insisted. Abbie’s computer core, along with its crew, was given a burial with full military honours. Many of us engineers were present as well. It was a short ceremony, and they were eventually moved to a military graveyard elsewhere on the planet, but the humans had gained our respect, and we held our own ceremony later. A celebration of their deeds.

When I asked if they wanted the tank back, the commander looked at it and shook his head. It wasn’t worth the effort to scrap it, he told me, and I bristled, about to protest when he suggested we turn it into a monument.

So there it stands, stripped of its human tech and with its weapons disabled. Its armour is cratered, melted and gutted, its active protection systems completely defunct, what little shielding it had was blown out, and parts of its dark grey paint job have been scorched off.

But painted where the original markings had been mostly burnt off, we made sure that everyone who passed it would know this was TEF-48813, known to all of us as Abbie.

======================

By /u/DutchguyWaffle on /r/HFY

When our coalition’s exploration drones found the Sol system, we knew just from initial scans that there was nothing much of note there. Most of the planets there were completely devoid of life of any kind; just a handful of barren rocks and gas giants. The only planet that was interesting was the third planet, which scans showed to be filled with life.

Over the next several days, our probe scouted the Earth. While it could not see much through the immense amount of space debris that littered the planet, apparently from failed launches into space, it got some intel on what was on the surface. There was a diversity of flora and fauna, an abundance of liquid water that shockingly was littered with specks of stagnant islands of debris, and a sapient species known as humans that seemed to be the cause of the somewhat common structures and the aforementioned space debris. Scans showed there to be just about eight billion members of this race.

The probe continued onwards after a couple weeks of scanning the surface. Its primary mission was to explore a newly discovered system that seemed to be rich in resources, and it wouldn’t stop for some out-of-the-way planet on the edge of nowhere. Sure, the humans had realized that they could go to space, but by the amount of debris hovering around their planet all of their attempts had basically failed. It seemed to most scientists that the humans would need another four hundred years before they made ships capable of leaving the Earth, and even more to discover FTL travel on their own. We had never seen such a pitifully slow race before. Most species that tried to get to space would immediately make it their main goal, to break the confines of their home planet.

Except the humans.

Sometime later, a conflict broke between two member races of the coalition: the powerful, warlike Xanzi and the somewhat newer and more much more docile Dan’ik. Everyone knew the Dan’ik were the victims in this war, but knew that they would face the wrath of the Xanzi’s powerful military if they interceded. So the Xanzi ships easily glassed and sterilized one world, captured their other planet without so much as a sweat and used their influence in the Senate to convince their allies and some swing races to kick the Dan’ik out of the coalition.

Nobody tried to defend the Dan’ik; they were a fledgling member race, with no respresentatives in the government, with few outstanding qualities to speak of. Only ten billion members, a nearly nonexistent military (which may have been part of the reason why the Xanzi invaded), and only a handful of FTL capable ships. They were almost as piltiful as the humans, as one Senator noted, and it might be best to send them to the Sol system and test the humans. It would be a waste of resources, after all, to send an actually important race and a new fleet to greet the humans; why not use the Dan’ik?

So the fifty-two large Dan’ik colony ships and numerous smaller civilian freighters and transports, all carrying their share of the seven billion who survived the war and weren’t enslaved by the Xanzi, jumped on their own to the Sol system, with no support and no turning back. Their ships were packed to the seams with refugees, people with no home to go back to. Nobody would be happy to greet them in the state that they were in.

Except, apparently, the humans.

Several weeks went by before our second probe reached the Sol system, purpose built to study how the human and Dan’ik races interacted. By the time it arrived, it brought back news of what happened: the human governments of Earth (and yes, there were many of them) had accepted the Dan’ik into their society. Their planet was teeming with construction, and about half of the ships that arrived at their destination were still orbiting space. Most of the space debris, curiously, was cleared out. It would be a while until they were fully adapted, though. Nobody could handle so many refugees at once.

Except, as we found out, the humans.

As the few researchers tasked with watching the drone footage saw, the residents of Earth adapted extraordinarily quickly to their new situation. They built new structures at blistering speed, utilizing massive machines that simply printed entire cities in just a few weeks. Dan’ik freighters that once shipped cargo now moved in the asteroid belt, mining materials to build new structures and, most surprisingly, new ships. The humans had apparently learned to reverse-engineer virtually every technology the Dan’ik had to offer, from particle shields to FTL drives. Vehicles that once were wheeled or tracked were converted to hold antigravity nodes; new unique ships, supposedly of human design, were built, and to our shock they proved even faster than the Dan’ik ships to precede them.

Never had we seen such industriousness before. On most planets, it took months to build a new ship, and another month if it was to have an FTL drive, which were somewhat rare throughout the coalition. Most coalition ships relied on sunlight engines as FTL drives were too complicated to mass-produce and too expensive to make standard-issue; only wealthy inter-system traders or large military carriers or battleships had them, while most other smaller ships like cruisers and frigates didn’t have them at all. And on this previously ignored planet, new ships would be built and launched in a week. While some would hover around Earth or the local moon, most would immediately make use of their FTL drives and punch a hole in time-space, traveling to who knows where.

By now, our leaders were growing both curious and anxious at this new threat to their way of life. Xanzi generals were vocal about seizing whatever made the humans so efficient, and our Senate capitulated and allowed the Xanzi to assemble a strike force to take back what they believed was rightfully theirs. A hundred massive ships, including carriers, destroyers, battleships, frigates, and even a planet-killing dreadnought, all packed with enough firepower to simply subjugate another member race if they wanted. Thousands of small fighters, hundreds of troop transports and landing craft for the eventual takeover of planet Earth. A single planet against the might of a full Xanzi fleet was a pushover, no matter how prepared you were. And there was no way Earth was prepared, after only a year since the Dan’ik first appeared at their doorstep. Most races would surrender immediately and hope to get away with their lives, as the Dan’ik did after just two days of fighting.

Except, of course, the humans.

As soon as the Xanzi fleet arrived near the system’s largest gas giant to regroup and begin their attack, a small fleet of a dozen cruiser-class ships assembled near Earth to defend their home. As the Xanzi approached the asteroid belt, the fleet grew steadily until it matched the Xanzi in size, as more ships jumped in from seemingly nowhere. And when the Xanzi crossed the belt, the human fleet sped to meet them in the middle, on a small red planet called Mars. When both forces collided, the battle was more even than anyone thought it could be; although the Dan’ik ships originally had poor shields and weaponry just a year prior, the human cruisers and battleships seemed to match their Xanzi counterparts, trading blow for devastating blow. The Xanzi fleet was whittled down to fifty ships, including their flagship dreadnought and a few carriers meant for subjugating a planet, battling against sixty human cruisers and destroyers all intent on driving back the enemy.

Eventually, the Xanzi decided to retreat. The dreadnought turned away from Earth, attempting to jump back to friendly territory before it was destroyed. Before it and the remaining ships could, though, the three largest human carriers released a small wave of fast troop transports, numbering nearly five hundred, each directed at a specific Xanzi ship. While the fleet was attempting to flee, they failed to see the transports punch into their ships’ hulls and lock in before jumping away into a nearby allied system, human marines in tow. The scouting probe watched as the human ships hovered near Mars, as if waiting for the Xanzi ships to return and renew their attack. But the Xanzi ships were gone for good; they had retreated. Never once had a Xanzi full fleet been so battered that they were forced to fall back; no race’s military was capable of standing up to them in a battle and going toe to toe.

Except, evidently, the humans.

The Xanzi leaders were shocked at the defeat. An entire full fleet and four million servicemen, reduced to quarter strength, by the effort of a single planet and what were a bunch of fumbling apes just four hundred days ago? There was outrage at this turn of events, and the Xanzi generals called for the flag admiral to be reprimanded, executed, and perhaps even demoted to midshipman afterwards. However, communications with the flagship dreadnought were never answered, and the ship was presumed destroyed. This was even worse; one of their prize flagships destroyed? Those ships were the top of the line, and there were only nine of them in the entire coalition; it was unfathomable! The Xanzi prepared to mobilize their entire military (since the rest of the coalition didn’t want to step in for a number of reasons); their four remaining full fleets combined together and prepared to rendezvous with the survivors of their expeditionary force.

On arrival, the fleet admirals were in for a pleasant surprise; their prized dreadnought was not, in fact, destroyed. It hovered in place, surrounded by its supporting carriers and battleships, all four massive planet-killing cannons...charged and ready? This too came as a surprise to the fleet admirals; it was standard protocol to never keep dreadnought cannons charged unless you were ready to fire; otherwise, your ship’s power would be drained, your shields would falter, and your cooling systems would eventually fail to do their job.

It was too late that the four Xanzi admirals realized what had happened. By the time the call went out to engage evasive maneuvers, to divert all power to shields, to charge their own cannons, or to abandon ship entirely (as all four flagships had, in the chaos, forgotten to communicate with one another), the dreadnought facing them had fired its cannons with perfect accuracy. Each huge blast of energy, with the power of a thousand nuclear warheads behind it, hit its target head on. The force of the explosion wasn’t enough to completely destroy the dreadnoughts, but it eliminated their shields, knocked out their main and backup reactors, and obliterated most of their support ships in the direct vicinity. As the four flagships went dark, all systems offline, the admirals watched through the glass windows of their bridges as the sixty human ships their colleague had faced in battle jumped in, turned towards the dreadnoughts, and launched waves of strike craft…

Four days later, the Xanzi signed a treaty of unconditional surrender to the newly formed Terran Union. It surrendered all of their slaves, surrendered their technology, and stated that they no longer owned the five dreadnoughts that the joint human/Dan’ik military now occupied, hovering ominously over the Xanzi homeworld’s capital. Never had anyone stood up to the most powerful force in the galaxy and turned its own weapons against it. Not once had the Xanzi suffered a defeat so crushing, a defeat that would never again allow them to be as mighty as they once were. It seemed that nothing would ever be as powerful as they once were.

Except, well, the humans.

===================

By /u/SomeOne111Z on /r/HFY

Every civilization that wishes to survive has to follow one rule: stay quiet.

Stay in your system, improve your technology and do everything you can to not attract attention. If you need to expand then do so slowly and with specialized FTL engines so no one can scan for your movements.

They will know if you break the rule.

No one really knows what they are but the pattern is very simple: a civilization does something to attract attention and, in a few hours, it is gone.

All attempts at defence have proven useless, even the oldest and mightiest of the known empires don’t dare challenge whatever horror lurks in the starless void. Doing so only ever leads to destruction.

Civilizations are not heartless, however. Every time a new fledgling species is found the nearest advanced people give them a small whisper of information. It is risky and no one is forced to do such a thing but almost all sapients do it since they too were small once.

What happened when Gaia started transmitting messages to the void was quite the standard procedure: A type 2 intercepted the message, blocked it so no one else could hear it, and then whispered back how the natives should stay quiet and why.

Their duty was done and it was up to the primitives to either listen to the advice or perish.

Much to the delight of Gaia’s neighbour the messages soon stopped coming.

A few parties were made in celebration of successfully saving another species from total extinction.

After 10 years the parties ended.

After 30 the primitives were just small talk for most people.

After 100 only a few scholars and curious students ever learned about that event.

After 500 the only evidence that they had helped anyone was on old decaying servers.

Then something happened.

There, on the spot where that pale blue dot stood, a new message appeared.

And it was big.

A gigantic signal beamed throughout the void like a sun washing its light over a dark forest.

The message might have been on an untranslatable language but its meaning could be understood by all.

“Come and get some”

Only a few minutes after the message washed over the quiet galaxy the entire void changed.

Gigantic ships which were once hidden and waiting for prey emerged from the edge of blackholes and the depths of planets and asteroids. Entire stars and planets which were once thought to be part of common solar systems revealed their true identity as war machines of unimaginable scale.

And they were all headed to one place.

The entire galaxy watched in awe as the beasts that controlled almost the entire void marched towards their prey.

But then they stopped.

And one of them imploded on itself.

Then another.

Then ten thousand more.

If the galaxy was in awe before, now they were in sheer disbelief.

There, on the interstellar void between Gaia and the rest of the galaxy, a truly gigantic fleet stood against the great monsters. Both sides fought fiercely as the unstoppable force of the void clashed against the seemingly unmovable defence of the Gaians.

And there they stood, two titans clashing in the void while the very fabric of the galaxy bent under the pressure of the battle.

By the tenth year of fighting, however, the monsters slowed down. It was a small difference but it just kept growing.

By the fifteenth year the Gaians were destroying two enemy ships for every one they lost.

By the eighteenth year it was over. Gaia had won.

The other civilizations stood in stunned silence.

Some were too scared to attract the attention of this new predator. Some were quietly making plans to serve their new overlords. Most were just too shocked to react.

Another message came through, this time it was written in all sapient languages:

“Sorry, we don’t like the quiet”

=======================

By /u/Mercury_the_dealer on /r/HFY