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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Muzolf on 2025-06-26 13:59:18+00:00.

• Damned apes sure love their fancy weaponry.

The remark pierced the oppressive silence of the Prowlers bridge like a brick thrown trough a closed window. Commander Kaba, who was until then, lost in the display of her stations screens gave an annoyed snort before rising, her feathered crest standing upright, her scales reflecting the red light from the machinery, leaving the impression of an angry spectral dragon. The imposing sauromantian female could dominate the room without needing to even stand up from her throne of steel, granted, the captains chair was in an elevated position for exactly this reason. While she preferred a more informal interaction with her crew as what was the norm in the empire, lately she found that some took her more relaxed stance as an invitation for slacking off or forgetting themselves.

• What was that? Did the away team signal back? If so, i would very much prefer a proper report!

The one comms officer gulped, and flattened his own crest in a submissive display, the other who was from a semi-aquatic species with only a superficial resemblance to the rest of the crew, one of the many client states of the Amber empire, could only make themselves look smaller by lowering their head.

• Yes commander! The away team reports that preliminary analysis confirms our suspicions. The damage and the radiation trace on the wreck is consistent with matter-antimatter annihilation. The humans seem to have used antimatter weaponry.

• That is hardly news, can they tell if it was in the form of a torpedo, or fired from a gun?

• Too early to say, we will need a proper analysis later, all they can say that it was a controlled detonation.

• I would certainly hope so. - The thought of the alliance having that much antimatter that they decided to just fling it around free-form in hopes of killing their enemies would have been terrifying. No, not even the humans could be that reckless or wasteful. - Be that as it may, that is not the main reason we are here for, any progress on the black box?

• They need more time, it seems the crew had sealed off certain sections of the ship before their demise, and the command center is not where it was supposed to be.

• Very well, renew signal blackout until they have something of significance to report.

She could feel the lingering question that the comms officer dared not to speak. She let out another annoyed snort and a rumble from her throat. This was the problem with her kind, you gave up the seemingly pointless posturing and displays of dominance, and some took it as a sign of weakness. Do what every sauromantian leader does, and you get a culture of silence around you where your will become deaf and blind thanks to your own crew not speaking up, even when they should. She decided to answer without having to hear the question.

• It might seem excessive, we are far out, this corpse of a vessel has been dead for weeks, and the alliance task force has shown no interest in collecting its remains so far. But I would remind you who and what we are facing.

As she expected, the weapons officer, Ralga was the first to speak up. He never bought into the stories surrounding the alliance, and the primates at the center of it. With a flick of a switch she had the bridge comms transmit to the rest of ship, might as well break up the monotony for the crew, and give them a clearer picture.

• Surely their reputation is exaggerated. If half of the rumors were true, they would have conquered the entire Orion arm by now. Unbeatable fleets and battleships that are indestructible, new technologies that border on magic every other day that are yet somehow never used again later. And the latest rumors, of phantom ships? Nothing but ghost stories created by weaklings and primitives who never saw a stealth ship.

• Well yeah, would be a crappy one if they did.

Amused rumbles all around. Kaba gave a look to the nav officer who turned Ralgas rant into a joke, but decided to not comment on it. It was time to address the elephant in the room.

• You all know why we are here. And Ralga has a point. Their reputation is most certainly exaggerated, in fact, since you are all involved, I might as well share how the Shadowguard confirmed many of the myths surrounding the humans to being a work of their own propaganda networks.

It seemed as if the temperature had suddenly dropped, the mentioning of the Shadowguard would usually do that, and also get the attention of everyone. It might have seemed she just undermined her own position, and the significance of their mission here, so now was the time to turn it around.

• They most certainly use fear as a deterrent and as a weapon, but make no mistake about it. They would not be half as effective without a truth at the core of it all. You mentioned the reputation of their invincible fleets, or more precisely, their battleships, “dreadnaughts” - She needed a few attempts to exactly translate the name from English to Neomanti, and she had to resist the urge to go into detail about the history of earth that she spent the last months studying. - as they call them. I could spend more time explaining just the history of how that ridiculously dramatic sounding name came to be as Koz and his team would need to take that wreck apart, for now just understand this, they never lost a single one of those since they started building them.

• Are we sure they didn`t just cover up any losses?

The nav officer immediately regretted asking that question as they met with the commanders gaze, but it seemed she decided to address it without making a fuss about the disrespect of interrupting a superior.

• They certainly could have one or two, and i know of at least one case where they only technically did not lose one to enemy action, but still had to scuttle it themselves before their opponents could destroy it, to keep that record going. My point is, they could not have pulled off creating that reputation without having a damn good battle record in general. Sure, in some particular cases they sacrificed scores of smaller ships in engagements that went south, only to save their capitals that got into trouble. However, usually they pulled it off without needing unreasonable losses of every other asset they had, enough times to create the theme.

She paused for a moment, but raised a claw to demand attention and for any questions or remarks to have to wait.

• Their reputation for technological superiority, or more precisely, showing up to fights with some new gadget that throws the whole order of void warfare into chaos. Its thanks to them spending a ridiculously disproportionate amount of resources and effort into trying to find an edge over others, way more as even our engineering guilds. Thanks to survivors bias, peoples of the Orion sector rarely remember the numerous failures. They don`t remember the fancy weapon that posed a bigger threat to the user as their targets, or the dumb ideas that just failed, they remember the successes. Their news networks and information warfare cells make sure you only recall the things in question that worked fine, and they will sweep under the rug the fact that it turned out to be too impractical and expensive in the long run, or any other reasons why they stopped using them. And this part is the reason why we are here.

She cleared her throat, and took up a more menacing pose, as well as speaking in a low, threatening tone.

• Plenty of times, their enemies pulled up historical records, found out that the humans actually did not do anything new, and if they were lucky, they still had the time and means to apply some cheap and effective countermeasure that rendered the advantage null and void. That, is why this is more then just a scout mission. We are here to make sure we don`t need luck for that, if it ever comes to a conflict between us and the alliance.

The commander sighed, for now this should be enough as motivation. As for the exact orders at hand.

• So until we know for a fact that this alliance task force are as blind to our presence as we hope them to be, i want our measures for standing undetected to be the same as if we were in the middle of a heavily populated star system with patrols on every corner. Don`t let the Prowlers state of the art as a stealth ship go to your heads. I want every little detail that is out of place, every blip on a sensor to be reported, and i want to hear any and all concerns voiced to me. Yes Hikar, what is it?

She turned to the tech officer who seemed to nervously shift from one leg to other, while apparently being unsure if he needed to look at the commander or his stations sensors screen.

• So, hypothetically. What would be the cheap and effective countermeasure to an incoming antimatter warhead?

To be continued, maybe.

Disclaimer: You might notice that the aliens in the story use human terminology, measurement units and common phrases. I did not want to resort to the calling rabbit smeerps trope because while adding a few alien sounding words can deepen ones immersion, like measuring your distance in kellicams while your cloaked bird of prey is stalking that federation cruiser, i would rather not saturate my writing that has an already bad case of world salads and runaway sentences with hard to follow new terms. So take it like a faithful translation that did its best to translate not just words but idoms and meanings to their closest English equivalent.