Deadly, Deadly Humans

By WRickWritesSciFi

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As it happened, it was the Kalu-Kamzku who encountered Humans first. And, being the Kalu-Kamzku, they immediately attacked.

This was unwise.

Our galaxy is a big place and has only a handful of sentient species capable of interstellar flight ( Yes, yes, foremost of whom are we, the Amia. ). As it turned out, unknown to anyone else the Humans had quietly been building a small domain for themselves in one remote and largely unremarkable corner of the galaxy. Nothing major, just a few dozen colonies in the systems closest to their home star. But the important thing is, they had no idea that the Kalu-Kamzku existed ( Or any other sentient species for that matter. ).

One would think, therefore, that in a first encounter between a species as aggressive - well, aggressive is the wrong word; say, uncompromising - as the Kalu-Kamzku and Humans ( A relatively primitive race who moreover had no idea the Kalu-Kamzku existed and certainly had no experience in dealing with them. ), that the Humans would come off worse.

This was not the case. ( Why? I'm explaining why, impatient fledgling. Now pay attention, because here is the history lesson, and a valuable lesson it is. ) A Kalu-Kamzku Armed Recon Team found a small Human settlement in a world that had been marked for economic exploitation by their Co-ordinator ( Which passes for their government. ). The settlement had not been there long; a few years, a decade at most - put up after the initial survey was conducted. As I said, the Kalu-Kamzku are uncompromising - finding buildings where there were supposed to be none, they immediately set about burning them to the ground. It's entirely possible that they didn't realize that the structures were made and inhabited by sentients. Semi-telepathic species are often like that ( In the case of the Kalu-Kamzku, thoughts can be transmitted by pheromones. ) - not good with a theory of mind, since they already know the thoughts of other members of their species, and therefore have no need to extrapolate. Thus they aren't very good at recognising sentience in alien species.

I digress; I was saying that they burnt the Human settlement to the ground. Well, they tried to at least, but they didn't get very far. Fortunately for scholars everywhere, a Kalu-Kamzku AR team has helmet-mounted recording equipment, backed up to their ship's black box in real-time. That, combined with the Human accounts, gives us a fairly reliable account of what happened.

The ART leader went up to the first building and, ignoring the unidentified creatures ( Humans. ) running away from it, began to torch it with his arm-mounted flamer, making short work of it. The next building was slightly larger, two stories instead of one, but the Kalu-Kamzu are big - they're five meters long (though their bodies are only one wide at most) and normally hold themselves a little under two meters off the ground. If they rear up on their four hind legs ( They have six limbs, the front two pairs being used as legs or arms depending on the situation. ), they're even taller. The ART leader shot a burst of flame into the ground floor, then reared up and shot a burst of flame in through the second-floor window. For good measure, he let off a few bursts with the multi-purpose laser mounted on his other forelimb.

So, this avatar of destruction, along with his nineteen other team members, is tearing through the Human settlement, so far largely oblivious to the actual Humans. However, he then spots a vehicle leaving the settlement and cripples it with a laser shot. Going up to finish it off with his flamer, he finds four Humans - a male, a female, and two juveniles ( A typical Human family, if you're interested in the exobiology of it. ) - cowering in the wreckage. His recorder shows that he definitely pauses here; perhaps being a Team Leader he was slightly less obtuse than most Kalu-Kamzku. Only for a moment though - then he raises his flamer to continue with the sterilization.

It's at this point that he realizes that he no longer has a flamer - or the arm it was attached to for that matter. He lets out a great keening screech as he realizes he's been injured, and backs away from the wrecked vehicle. There, standing between him and the Human family, and next to his severed arm, is another Human. A Human in a fully-encasing armored suit had managed to creep up underneath him and remove his limb before he even noticed the Human was there. A Human holding a large kinetic pistol, and a sword. An actual sword.

The Kalu-Kamzku commander stares in astonishment for a moment - he's going into shock, but he still has a few minutes before he becomes catatonic - then he realizes that he still has his combine-laser mounted on his other arm. He brings it up, points it at the Human, and fires - and the Human simply step aside! The Human didn't actually dodge the laser blast, but he was so quick that in the time it took the ATR commander to bring the weapon to bear, aim, and pull the trigger, he was able to assess where the blast would land and simply move aside. That is how fast Human reaction times are!

The ART commander keeps firing of course, but it doesn't do him any good. The last footage the helmet cam records is of a blur of movement passing beneath the unfortunate commander, before - well, he was the first casualty in the Human-Kamzku conflict.

So who was this mysterious Human with the sword? And why was he there? Well, that is the amazing thing - he was there for exactly the same reason the Kamzku AR team was. He was an armed Scout who, along with four others, had gone to the planet to prepare the way for an invasion. Humanity is not a united polity, you see, and the faction that had sent the Scouts was fighting - in a formalized manner that they call 'war' - with the faction that had built the colony, and intended to seize the planet from them. This was not an unusual state of affairs by the way - the different Human factions, and the factions within factions, were almost constantly fighting each other. But this is the important part - while the Kamzku were about as heavily armed as Kamzku get and still only really prepared for dangerous animals, the Human Scouts only had what Humans considered the lightest weapons available - and were still equipped enough to drive off the Kalu-Kamzku. The Scouts were mostly only suitable for stealth operations. Hence the sword: with a monomolecular electrostatically-bonded edge, it could cut through just about anything - in silence.

It worked, too. The Scout and his four partners cut through most of the Kamzku before they even realized anything was wrong. I should add that their active camouflage armor helped too - that was how the Scout had gotten so close to the ART commander in the first place. In any case, the AR team was totally outclassed and only three of the Kalu-Kamzku made it back to their ship, out of a team of twenty. They could probably have bombarded the colony from orbit, but they were in such shock ( And barely capable of running their ship with so few of them. ) that they scurried back to their home space as fast as their ship could take them.

Are you confused yet? I certainly was when I first studied this. Intra-species violence is not completely unheard of, of course - mating rituals in particular often involve some degree of physical conflict - but still, it more often takes the form of aggressive displays with no injuries. The fact that Humans routinely kill each other is shocking, but mass, organized violence? Certainly, no other species has anything like Human 'wars'. Most conflicts within species that are not dealt with diplomatically ( And negotiation is usually the favored, less costly, strategy. ) are, like mating, resolved with displays of power - after all, why risk actual injury when it is easier to assess in advance who is the stronger?

Perhaps it could be down to the fact that Humans are a carnivorous hunter-species. That is very unusual; complex societies usually evolve from herd species ( Or flock, in our case. ), which generally means that they were nearer the bottom end of the food chain when they evolved, and are probably herbivores. This holds true for most sentient species in the galaxy - we Amia subsist mainly on rich fruits found in the high canopy, where our flocks were hunted by Gia-hawks in the infancy of our race. The Kalu-Kamzku built hives of wood pulp on their homeworld and were hunted by Mazu-snakes when they left these to gather fungus from under tree bark. Each species has an ancestral predator that haunts their racial memory. ( Don't think I don't know that you sometimes take cut-out plastic wings and scare people by making hawk shadows. It's not funny. )

Yet although there are things on 'Earth' ( The human homeworld. ) that will eat Humans ( Yes, I shudder to think of what could pose a threat to an adult Human male. ), that is not what frightens them. Watch some of their media sometime - I guarantee you that although you will see the occasional alien or monster, the vast majority of violence portrayed will be inflicted by other Humans. For Humans, the main threat to their survival ( Excluding diseases, which is another horror story in its own right. ) has always been other Humans. This is what makes them so dangerous - ignore the fact that they are carnivores, put aside for a moment that they evolved both to hunt other animals AND survive predation by things even more vicious than them: they are the only sentient species in the known galaxy that evolved to cope with predation by another sentient.

When you or I feel threatened, our instinctive reaction is to find a leaf to hide under - and that's all it is: an instinct, left over from our days as Gia-prey. It's just a relic that's hung around in our hind-brain. And it's our only fear-reaction since hawks were our only major predators and hiding was the only effective strategy. We won't naturally try to run, or fight, and if we encounter a situation that would call for this it's difficult to force ourselves to - our intellect may say one thing, but all our hind-brain says is hide. And we never encountered enough other threats to change this hard-wiring. Likewise, the Kalu-Kamzu will rear up when threatened, to make themselves look bigger, but they won't actually risk combat if they can run away, because against their home-world predators, this would usually result in serious injury at the very least.

Humans, however, take instinct to a whole new level and then take it beyond that. Their response when threatened has been constantly honed and constantly upgraded over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution - because since their main threat was usually other Humans, the threats evolved with them. And on top of the base physical evolution, their cultural evolution has been similarly affected. A significant portion of almost all Human cultures has been dedicated to making Humans who are better at killing other Humans - 'warriors'. In many cultures, this is actually a separate caste whose entire lives are dedicated to making themselves better at killing enemy Humans ( If you want further study, the archetype of this is the European Knight and the Japanese samurai - although if you ever met a Human and asked them, I'm sure they would debate you at great length about which culture produced the better 'warriors'. And don't ask, by the way; most of the answers won't make sense to you anyway and you would be happier not hearing the bits that do. )

Humanity evolved while engaging in a constant arms race. Imagine if, when we first developed hawk nets, the hawks had come up with a means to cut through them, then matched every other solution we came up with. Not a pretty thought, is it? Yet this is normal for humanity. And it produced a species that is incredibly fast, incredibly tough, not as big as some but weight-for-weight extremely strong - even though they are smaller than the Kalu-Kamzku are ( There are few bigger than them in fact. ), if that first encounter had taken place without weapons the Scouts would probably have had the strength to simply tear off the Kamzku's limbs.

And most importantly of all, they have the neural architecture to go with their biological weaponry. Unlike every other species in the galaxy, evolving to fight other sentients meant that they haven't just had to out-fight their opponents, they've had to out-think them as well. Some of the most recognizable figures in Human culture are those who fought other Humans, not in personal combat, but with their organizational skills and strategies. Humans value intelligence in conflict at least as much as they value physical violence, and their reactions to threats are extremely complex and very adaptable.

I imagine you're all quite frightened by now - well, you should be. I've portrayed Humans as unstoppable killing machines - which is more or less the truth. But remember also that they are sentient and therefore capable of great complexity. Has anyone been paying attention enough to notice the part of my story that didn't make sense? The Human Scouts were on that planet to attack the colony, yes? So why did they come to its defense when the Kalu-Kamzku attacked? I suppose you might think that they wanted the buildings intact, or something - dilettantes in the field of human study will often try to pass this off as the explanation. It is considerably more complicated.

'War', apparently, is not just a free-for-all where one side tries to kill as many of the other as before their own faction is exterminated. Humans may be savage but they are far from mindless. There are rules, which is what distinguishes 'war' from simply killing other Humans. These rules mostly concern who can and can't be killed - enemies who put down their weapons and surrender themselves are generally not allowed to be killed, for example. Members of the enemy faction who do not actually fight, 'civilians', are also supposed to be left alone. These rules vary in consistency and application, but one almost universal taboo is against the killing of juveniles. The Human Scouts might well have remained hidden, as per their orders, if the Kamzku hadn't provoked them by attacking a Human family with young. If you ever decide to take up xeno-cultural studies, go out into the galaxy, and actually meet some Humans, and you want to know how not to get yourself disemboweled lengthways like that Kalu-Kamzku ART commander, it's simple: never, ever threaten a Human child. There are other guidelines when dealing with Humans, of course, but obey this simple rule and you could probably go around Earth all on your own without ever getting torn limb from limb. I did, in my student days. Just because a Human can kill you with barely any effort, doesn't mean they particularly want to.

What happened with the Humans and the Kamzku after the colony incident? The Kamzku sent a fleet to eliminate the threat ( Still not understanding what the threat was. ) and promptly was sent running by a combined Human fleet. After the Scouts of one faction came to the aid of another's settlement, they found it a lot easier to put aside their differences - the surveillance footage taken by the Scouts of horrifying alien monsters helped as well. In fact, all Human factions united against the aliens.

Although the Human ships were less technologically sophisticated, they had far more ships built specifically for combat, and the complex tactical maneuvers of Humans fleets used to fight space battles with each other were no match for Kamzku 'strategy', which was simply advance and shoot. What few ground engagements there were usually ended as massacres - remember, the Scout team that wiped out four times their number of Kamzku were 'lightly' armed by Human standards. It finally occurred to the Kalu-Kamzku to ask why this was happening, and after thoroughly analyzing their new enemy and finding them to be sentient, they finally managed to reach out to Humans and establish a dialogue.

It may surprise you to know that Humans were perfectly ready to stop killing Kamzku and make peace. If anyone tries to get into a debate on how such a deadly species stopped the killing so easily - and this still passes for 'intellectual' discussion at some schools - don't. The answer is perfectly simple: they had never encountered aliens before, and they were fascinated. As much as they were outraged by the attack on the colony, they were more interested in gaining information about the first other sentient species they'd discovered. As I said, Humans are complex creatures. Not that they got much out of the Kalu-Kamzku, but the conflict had drawn the attention of the other star-faring species in the galaxy. Thus the cultural exchange began - today there are Humans all over the galaxy, studying the various species and cultures out there. There are even some in our world at the moment - in fact, and this was very difficult to arrange, but if one of you would kindly open that door, right here, now, is...

...oh, you should have seen the looks on your faces. You were about to dive under the tables. Oh, I'm sorry, but that was just too good - you might want to think of this next time you're tempted to go out with plastic hawk wings.

Sadly, I don't have any deadly, deadly Humans here to show you. Even more sadly, this is the end of the lesson. Just as well, I need to stretch my wings - we've been in here a while, haven't we? Although from the look of it, it'll be a few minutes before you lot will go outside where there isn't a nice, thick roof over your heads. Anyway: what then, should we take away from this? Well, that'll be the topic of your assignment, actually - but as a simple summary I'll say this:

Never, ever get into a conflict with Humans. And if you absolutely can't avoid it, then for goodness sake get other Humans to do the actual fighting for you. It's what they were made for, after all.