My contribution to the humans are space orcs, it’s probably been seen before but oh well.
So, You guys know about pursuit/persistence hunting right? Where we just follow the prey without stopping until it slows down or drops dead from fear and exhaustion?
What if when aliens first discover earth, the thoughts of these bipedal predatory omnivores are bad enough but we seem pretty obsessed with farming our food so maybe we aren’t much of a threat.
Once humans are zipping about in space, that’s when they realise that these harmless bipedal omnivorous farmers are actually hunters who just never give up.
If someone hurts their crew, they just follow it for days before killing it. These soft fleshy things are terrifying. These soft fleshy things may not be the strongest or fastest but we are some of the hardest damn things to kill because we just won’t die and if we survive we won’t stop until we get you.
We farm things because we can and because it’s easy. Not because we have to in order to survive.
We farm things because we’re too busy fighting each other to hunt for everything.
We stake out areas, we mimic its noises, we stalk it, we put ourselves in danger to kill a food source for fun.
Vilgo was a professional space pirate. They knew their job inside out. They had to. They’d seen what happened to others who didn’t. So their arrest came as something of a surprise.
Their last raid had only been a cycle ago, and they were still living on the profits. The raiders had taken the usual precautions – featureless rad suits, which gave no hint of their appearance, levitation boots and psionic grabbers to avoid actually touching anything on the ship, and, of course, a 20kAmp bolt of electrical energy into each of the crew members. They had missed no one. Vilgo was sure of that.
Apparently, though, the human in front of them didn’t care that they shouldn’t have been able to find Vilgo. The battle had been brief – his crewmates had been taken before they knew what had hit them, and the human seemed to be immune to their darts, though each was coated with enough opiate to fell three Gralankszs. Indeed, the human seemed a bit woozy, but had still managed to knock Vilgo prone on the ground. Now she was shackling them, reciting their rights. But how?
When they asked her, she responded that a member of the SS Nyancat had tracked them down.
Clearly, this was a lie. They remembered taking the Nyancat, yes, but that was more then eighty three cycles ago! And they had left none alive! The Nyancat should still have been floating in space with the corpses of its crew!
The officer, being a human, didn’t mind telling the story. As their crew was being taken in, she explained that her sister, the person who discovered Vilgo’s hideout, and been in the observation room of the Nyancat recording themselves with a handheld communication and entertainment device. After surviving the electrical bolt (the officer was unclear as to how this happened saying only “Yeah, it was a bit of a nasty shock,”), she had come to her senses and managed to find an image of Vilgo in her recording. Although she couldn’t identify them, she did manage to catch the serial number of their suit. After repairing and escaping in one of the emergency life vessels, she had made her way to the nearest hub world, and traced the suit to the factory it was made in. By examining the records, she determined when the suit had been stolen, and sat through 147 hours of surveillance footage before finding the tapes that showed Vilgo actually stealing the suit. Then she had begun the slow search for Vilgo when she happened to spot him at the first bar she looked in. After that, she simply placed one of the rainbow trails the Nyancat had been famous for on Vilgo’s ship, and followed it to their base.
Vilgo remembered that bar. That trip had been less than a cycle ago. Surely there was no way that an overused escape pod could have traced a barely-visible trail so quickly. At sub-lightspeed the pod could barely have gotten to and from the bar in time, and the trail wasn’t visible to any autonomous detection that Vilgo knew of.
Apparently, though, the human had maintained consciousness for more than sixty hours by gradually using more that 3g of caffeine, a poison so dangerous even humans weren’t usually supposed to ever consume more the 200mg at a time. But this human had traced their path with this venom coursing through her veins, only losing consciousness after leaving a signal beacon on their base asteroid and pointing her collapsing vessel towards the nearest world, and jamming the controls to full throttle. Even then, by the time she was within reach of the Federation authorities, she had enough composure to formally register charges against Vilgo and their crew.
Clearly, this was all an elaborate cover-up story for a traitor within Vilgo’s crew. But since they all were imprisoned together, they couldn’t think who might have sold them out.
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