Earth defense force/starship troopers based.
The galactic alliance, about the same time humans came in the alliance (but long enough for the alliance to realize humans' nature), is at war with a unintelligent but somehow space traveling insect race and are slowly losing. The alliance asks the humans for help to defeat them, asking for ships, attack vehicles, weapons, and soldiers. The humans misunderstand what they meant and take it as "Our equipment can only hold them, we need you humans to push them back". -- Anon Guest
For the longest time, the Galactic Alliance thought that the Human Motto was Make love and war. No efforts to correct them on this assumption proved efficacious. After all, Humans were both persistent and good at both of them, as evidenced by numerous close and even closer encounters before the Alliance finally welcomed Humans into their club.
The mistake they made was in underestimating just how much practice Humans had had at war. When the swarming Acridith threatened, and the Alliance fleet had to hold them back from their expanded and expanding territories, they asked the Humans to help. Specifically, "help push them back." They expected the status quo, where the new allies re-established the neutral zone and thinned the population to the point where the Acridith could live well for another century or so. Thing is... Humans don't think like that.
Humans have been at war since one tribe thought another tribe was looking at them funny. When ideologies weren't enough, they declared war on concepts. When concepts weren't enough, they declared war on actions. When actions weren't enough... well. They'd found other civilisations by then, and their trigger fingers always itched. They dived into war like ducks into water. It was, after all, their element.
They drove the Acridith back, all right. They had weapons violent and varied at their fingertips. They drove them back past the neutral zone. Back, past their outlying verdant planets. Back and further back. The front line kept moving and the Humans never once uttered the phrase, "Say when..."
They used chemical weapons. They used radioactive weapons. They used dirty bombs. They salted the earth for the Acridith, making certain that they would never advance again. They used everything in their extensive arsenals, and then invented worse ones.
Humans are very creative at destruction. Horrifyingly so, actually.
They drove the Acridith back, all right. Back to their origin world, where they deliberately sent meteors to the surface and the Alliance had to beg them to stop. This was not a genocidal mission, the Alliance insisted.
The Humans, to an individual, were puzzled by this. They're a clear threat, they argued. Let them come back and you'll just have to do the same thing over and over again. It's not like they're cogniscent. They show no signs of ever being so. We could end the threat they represent... it would be so easy...
They have the right to exist, argued the Alliance, so long as that right doesn't impede on anyone else's rights to do the same. They're not impeding anyone any more. Stop. Let them live.
It took some months and more than a few self-sacrifices to pull Human hands away from buttons that could have wiped out an entire species. Very careful negotiations to secure and protect a series of systems as a 'reserve' for the Acridith. As well as a series of 'rangers' to keep them within those borders.
Nevertheless, the Humans were proud of themselves. They had, after all, secured a large number of systems which could be settled by Allied peoples, used for resources, or even farmed for foodstuffs.
The Alliance, horrified, started drafting up protocols for exactly how to be very specific to Humans in times of necessary conflict.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / ankarb]
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