Kill the Human

We in the Coalition of Strength have long prided ourselves on our way of superiority through strength. Without struggle and constant challenge, there is no growth. Unlike our rivals the Pact of Peace. A bunch of self important such and suches that decided long ago to believe in growth through harmony. And they’ve taken it upon themselves to defend the League of Non-Aligned Worlds as well. The ones who prefer to just stay in their home systems and do nothing with no-one else aside from trading for rare or necessary resources.

We do have one planet where everyone agreed would be absolutely neutral. There, all negations and squabbles can be hashed out.

It is not a constant state of war. We send the occasional raid on a trade ship here or there. The Pact steps in whenever someone's territory gets too close to a League system. And then we at the Coalition have to remind them that we're stronger and we'll expand where we want. Then when both sides have lost a fleet or five, we set down for negotiations. It's how it's always been for as long as any of our races can remember.

But then they showed up. Those gross fleshy humans. They got lucky and limped their poor excuse for a colony ship onto a moon of a League system. So, as we do, The Coalition, The Pact and The League sent ambassadors. We made introductions and presented our policies. Of course, being weak newcomers they chose to side with the Pact of Peace. Turns out they're smarter than they look as well because they refused to give anyone their home systems coordinates.

And so, things went back to normal for the next few centuries. We almost forgot about the humans until we started running into their trade ships. At first they were fairly easy pickings. But then things got complicated and we had to scour the archives and dig through museums on how to counter kinetic weapons again. It was a headache for a while because we started losing entire raiding parties to them. I don't mean, we got there and it was just debris. No, we got there and nothing was left but our raid ship's distress beacon.

So naturally, we stepped up to the challenge. While exciting, it was strange, with other Pact ships they'd fire at us as soon as we got into range. But the humans? They'd greet us. They'd leave us alone until we fired first. By the way, what exactly is the top of a morning? And why and how are they sending it to us?

As if that wasn't bad enough, just when we started getting kinetic counters into place, they started integrating plasmas and our own weapons into theirs. Oh how we grew and learned! We hadn't had such a wonderful challenge since the last internal war!

But then it got to be too much. Our normal raids on Pact and League systems started getting more difficult. We started taking serious losses. Then oddly over the next couple of centuries, League numbers started dwindling. Not because we finally conquered them, but because they aligned themselves with the Pact.

In Pact systems we started seeing human ships. League systems started building their own offensive fleets. And when we raided them, we started seeing human tactics. We developed a system that could differentiate species when we scanned for life forms. We found within these formidable League fleets, there was always one lone human. We found that as soon as we took out the human, the League fleet went into a panic and we could pummel them like we used to.

It was simple. Find the human - Kill the human.

And for a while it was this easy. Until the Pact figured it out and started bolstering League fleets with their own. Eventually, we grew tired of this game and brokered a cease-fire. We backed off raiding the same systems and asteroid belts we always had. Instead, focusing on rebuilding our fleets and scouting the edges of known space again. We kept in touch and eventually the League of Non-Aligned Worlds disbanded as the final races were swayed by the charms of those smelly humans.

After another millenia and an invigorating internal war, we set our sights back to the old stomping grounds to test their metal. We coaxed them out by plundering a few farming worlds on the edge of Pact space. When a former League fleet arrived, the admiral thought they'd be easy pickings. But the battle raged on and the scans for the human kept returning negative.

As the Pact coward sounded retreat, he hailed the former League flagship demanding to know the location of the human.

“They've taught us well! There is no human here!"