The Rangarian ambassador stared across his desk, a look of confusion dulling his yellow eyes. “What are you saying?” he asked the human. “The war. You won, of course.”
“What are you talking about?” the Earth ambassador countered. “We lost. You won.”
“No, I am very sure that we lost.” The Rangarian’s voice rang with amusement.
“What about the Peace Accords?”
“Yes, we surrendered to the human race on Galactica, in—”
“No.” The human pounded a fist on the desk. “We surrendered to you!”
“This is obviously a misunderstanding. And I think I may know how this happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there’s been some confusion . . .”
The human pleaded, “What are you saying?”
“There were conflicting stories about the end of the war.” The Rangarian was embarrassed. “And I am afraid that it’s probably our fault.”
“What stories?”
Peering down at the human, the Rangarian said, “Listen, you’ve just gotten off that starship after what? Almost a year? There’s no need to get into all this right now.”
The human ambassador took a deep breath and replied, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist that you explain.”
“All right.” Two pale yellow eyes narrowed. “But you may find my elucidation difficult to accept, given the circumstances. First, your side did win the war, I assure you.”
“But that’s impossible. Why, we never won a battle in space. The disparity of our technologies was too vast. Your space navies destroyed us and we had no choice but to give up.”
The Rangarian heaved a huge sigh. “You know, that’s what we thought too. It’s a simple enough formula that we’ve used plenty of times over the last billion years. Throw our superior technology at an inferior civilization and wait for the inevitable. Unfortunately humans have a unique physiology which makes it impossible to conquer your species. You are extraordinarily fecund for a sentient species. And your adaptive capabilities are astounding.”
The human slouched. “I’m not sure I understand.”
A stubby gray finger tapped at the Rangarian’s desktop. “Let me give you some perspective. There are five major spacefaring races besides your people. Rangarian, Gann, Po, Irninian and the Miantili. In addition, there are a dozen other intelligent civilizations which have the same basic technology, but no interest in interstellar travel. Now, all of these cultures have scientific capabilities and technology far beyond the human race.”
“Yes.”
“But all of our combined knowledge and abilities can’t conquer a creature that propagates like humans. You breed like bacterium. Your life spans are incredibly short and you procreate at an impossible rate. How old are you?”
“Why, I’m-”
“Ninety? One hundred Earth cycles?”
The human sputtered, “Fifty-two!”
A harsh laugh rolled over the desk. “Why, the average Rangarian gestation is twice that long.”
“How long do you live?”
“I’m over twenty-three thousand and I am not yet middle aged.”
The human ambassador was shocked. “I had no idea.”
“This is the disparity that won the war. For you. All other civilized species live for tens of thousands of your years and our birth rates are infinitesimally small compared to humans.”
“I still don’t understand. You destroyed every one of our space fleets.”
Disgust filled the Rangarian’s voice. “And we obliterated whole planets, I know. We gassed you and bombed you and did everything we could possibly do to destroy you. But we couldn’t beat you no matter what we tried.”
“You destroyed Vega Prime.”
The Rangarian’s voice boomed. “Yes! We bombed it down to bedrock. And a century later there are still thousands of humans living on the southern continent. That is exactly what I’m talking about.”
“But you destroyed the entire planet.”
“And you’re still there. When we dumped ammonia on Augustus the planet’s atmosphere turned green and twelve million humans died in a matter of weeks. But a handful of your people were able to survive the poisonous atmosphere. Today there is a colony of ammonia-breathing humans on Augustus.”
The human slowly shook his head. “You’re saying we won the war. But that still doesn’t make any sense. We ceded all known space to your people in the Accords.”
“All known Rangarian space. That’s what I was saying before, that this is really our fault. The literal translation of the Peace Accords is that the Rangarian Empire retain the space we controlled before our two species encountered one another. And you humans get all the rest.”
“You’re actually serious?”
“We realized that eventually your species would spread throughout the galaxy regardless of our efforts to promote your extinction. We can only hope that you’ll leave us this one sliver of space to exist in.”
The human ambassador smiled.
“This happened because our government constructed the wording of the Peace Accords to be ambiguous enough to allow certain latitude in interpretation. For political expedience.” The Rangarian’s voice dropped. “In order to maintain our traditional domestic posture.”
“You intentionally mislead your populace.”
“We merely notified our people of the successful cessation of hostilities.”
“You told them you won the war.”
“Well, we let them assume——Yes. And somehow your government believed the fiction. How perfectly bizarre.”
“I can’t believe this. We actually won the war. What about the tribute mentioned in the peace agreement?”
“No. Once again—” The Rangarian sighed. “It is we who will be paying the gratuity to you.”
The human ambassador laughed. “You beat the hell out of us for two hundred years and it was all we could do to survive.”
The Rangarian ambassador groaned and shook his head. Survival was clearly enough.
—
Chris Dean travels the American west as a marketing representative and this writer adores Yellowstone, the Klamath, and anyplace the sequoias touch the sky. Chris’s work has appeared in Page & Spine and other publications.
