Humans are Space Orcs

Okay, I know the whole humans are space orcs thing is kind of commonplace now, but I wanted to throw my two cents into the lore of it. It’s nothing special or ground breaking in the way of humans being space orcs, but I still thought it was a descent storyline. Enjoy!

———————————————————————————————————————————————————

Humans are peculiar beings.  During the Inco-Humanic wars, the Inco Empire soon realized that humans were absolute monsters.  Their physical capabilities were something out of science fiction.  Healing what would appear to be fatal wounds, being able to regenerate entire organs from almost nothing, almost inexhaustible energy when pursuing a target, etc.  Their brains had to restrain their muscles from using their full strength all at once, otherwise their muscles would rip from their bones or even break their bones.  That said, sometimes that block could be circumvented in a life or death situation.  The number of Incans killed by a human on the brink of death were truly monumental.  To accomplish similar feats, us Incans would need to wear top of the line exogear to compete, and we simply did not have the resources to equip each of our soldiers with it.

The scary part about humans was their willingness to destroy.  After they thwarted our attempt at invasion, we tried to create peace.  But they weren’t willing to have peace until they could dictate the terms.  We killed a lot of their people because of our radiation weapons and superior technology, but they killed far more of ours through sheer animosity.  They went into battle without full body armor, carrying simplistic yet effective ballistic weapons.  They killed and killed.  When they ran out of ammunition, the changed over to knives.  When their knives dulled, they started using their hands.  They simply didn’t give up until they got to our home world.

“Captain,” my subordinate gurgled to me.  “The human on board is hungry again.”

Again!  This was the third time it needed to eat this cycle!  “Give it a double helping of rations and speed up this flight,” I gurgled back.  “We can’t keep feeding it this much food and make it to port without docking along the way.”

“Yes, sir.”

As part of the peace treaty we were strong armed in to by the humans, we had to give them free travel around the galaxy for fifty years.  At first we didn’t see that as an issue, but we underestimated how often and how fast they proliferate.  It’s only been twenty years and there are already whole colonies of humans sprouting up with a third generation being born.  This particular human had booked passage last minute and we did not have enough time to stock up with enough rations.

I sat back in my seating pod and massaged my face ducts.  Humans were a tiresome breed, but they had their uses.  At least pirates should stay away from us since we had a human with us.  I gazed out into the empty void of space and became lost in thought.  Unfortunately for me, The Alarm went off.  The Alarm was a specialized system put in place to warn us against another human attack.  Oh no, I thought to myself.  The human is on a rampage.  We were originally disquieted to hear that this particular human had fought against is in the Inco-Humanic wars, but he had seemed tame enough.  I guess I was wrong.

As I began to lock down the ship, the human came storming in.  “What the hell is this racket?” he asked.  “There are fire or something?”  Human age was easy to tell.  This one was about fifty of their years with thick corded muscle and pucker mark scars from when he must have gotten into physical confrontations with my kind.

I shrunk myself into my seat out of fear.  Humans were brutal.  They evolved strong bones and thick muscles for defense, but their primary mode of attack was blunt trauma using some of their weakest bones.  They had to train for years to properly use them without injury, but even that was no garuntee.  Lack of training would not stop one of them from taring through all of us though.  They were… creative with how they adapted to their lack of offensive abilities.  Almost all of them carried a knife, and this one in particular was trained to use his meat hooks.  That was why we were so scared of him.  He was trained to use his body to its peak.  Even the weakest human could take out the strongest Incan, and this human was far from the weakest.

“Well!?” he shouted.

“Uh,” I gurgled out.  “There is a human attack.”

“A what?”

“A human is attacking.”

“I’m the only human on board though,” he replied.

A bloodied Incan came bursting onto the bridge.  “The human… is… coming,” he managed to get out, but slumped over into a limp sack.  Dead.

The human before me whipped around.  “You have a stow away.”  He walked over to investigate the body.  “And it looks like he has an axe.”

“What do we do?”

“Do you have any weapons?  Guns, blasters, anything?”

“Only the radiation weapons we have to fend off pirates.”  Our radiation weapons did not work immediately on humans like they did on our species.  Since they evolved with such a thin atmosphere, their bodies had systems in place to deal with large amounts of radiation.  Instead of dying right away, the humans would get sick and die in a week.

“Idiots,” he muttered.  “Absolute idiots.  What if a pirate crew of humans took over?  You ever think about that?”

“Humans can’t fly our ships.”

“Did that stop us from commandeering them to get to your home world in the war!?”

“No, but we are at peace now.”

“That doesn’t mean there aren’t humans out there with their own motives and intentions.  Think!”

“I know,” I gurgled.  “We have pirates too.”

“No… We have whole countries who want to take over your ships.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t have time for this.  I’ve got to deal with this now before he wipes out the entire ship.  Do you know what this guy looks like?  What was he wearing, what was his skin color.  Did he have an accent?”

“I don’t know anything.  Why does that matter?”

The man shook his head.  “This is obviously a terror attack.  It could be Jihadis, white supremacist, Chinese insurgents, so on and so forth.  Each of them has different weapon and fighting preferences.”

“We don’t know.”

“Fine.  I’ll have to use what we do know.  This guy has an axe, and I have to deal with this.  Lock all the bulkheads behind me.  I will knock three times, pause, then knock another three times when I’m done.  I want all of you ready to get into escape pods if I don’t make it back.  Make sure this event doesn’t break the treaty.  This man does not represent our race.”

“But—”

“Please!  We cannot continue the bloodshed.”

I nodded and the human walked through the bulkhead.  I shut them all as soon as he left. There was talking, but I could not make out the words.  And before we knew it, the banging began.  The other Incans on the bridge cowered, trying to make themselves small.  The lifepods were primed and ready just in case.  Loud crashing that shook the very foundations of the ship.  If they kept this up, they might break the seal of the ship!  There was grunting that reverberated through the bulk heads and the metal of the ship.  At one point there was a loud scream, a pause, then a gurgling sound not too unlike the sound my species makes.  I looked to my comrades in the bridge, each of them shrunken small with their skin changing tones to match the deck.

Nock, Nock, Nock.  Pause.  Nock, Nock, Nock.

I slumped to the ground in a puddle of relief.  We were saved from a human by a human.  I took the ship out of lockdown.  I wriggled through the ship, trying to find the human that saved me.  It took three or four glargs, but I found him.  He was laying on the ground, staunching the bleeding from an axe wound to his rib.  I grabbed a human medical kit from the wall and began to mend him.  His face was a bloody mess, his teeth stained red.  One eye was closed shut and leaking blood.  His arm was dislocated.  All around me the walls were smattered with blood.  Dents in the frail walls separating us from the vacuum of space were ever precarious.  Any furniture that was in this room was broken to pieces.  In the corner lay another man with an axe buried in the side of his neck, one of the surefire ways to kill a human.  This human’s face was equally as mutilated as the one that rescued us, but I also noticed the pucker mark scars buried underneath the blood.  He also fought in the Inco-Humanic war.

“You saved our ship.  You didn’t need to risk your life when we could all have escaped with our lives.”

“Don’t mention it,” the human said.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you save our ship?”

The human took in a deep breath.  I have noted over the years that is a calming behavior common among humans.

“You seemed like nice people,” he said.  “I couldn’t let one of my own destroy your livelihoods.”

Confusing.  “Nice?  You risked your life because you though we were nice?”

“Yeah.”  The man coughed.  There was no blood from his lungs.  “You didn’t put me in one of those human containment rooms some of your species are fond of.  I noticed you had one, but you didn’t use it.  You also fed me enough food for three of your people.”

I let out a merry gurgle.  “You risked your life for our ship because we fed you?”

The man smiled.  “When you put it like that it makes me sound like a simpleton.  But yeah, pretty much.”

“What about him?”

The man sighed.  “An old war buddy.  You guys took everything from him in your first wave of attacks.  He couldn’t forgive you.”

“Took everything from him?”

The man paused.  “Your people killed his family all those years ago.  He wanted to send a message that some of us had never forgave you.”

“You killed your friend?”

His face became stone like.  “It had to be done.  We’ve killed plenty of your kind to last us a couple lifetimes.  You guys probably weren’t even involved with the fighting, so you were innocents.  He killed innocents and had to die.”  The man paused again, then began to stand up.

“You can’t!  Those wounds could be fatal.”

“Ah, don’t worry about it.  The axe got caught in my rib.  If anything, it’ll just be hard to breathe for a while.  You got any pain killers?”

I rummaged through the first aid kit and took out a container of opioids.  They were not chemically active in our species, but almost completely blocked the pain in humans.  The ability to block pain.  What a species.

The man took the bottle and smirked.  “You got two hundred oxies, but you don’t have a gun.”  Then he popped two pills.  He waited a couple minutes, then breathed a sigh of relief.  “That’s the stuff.”  He stuck his dislocated arm in between two pipes, jerked and with a loud pop he could move it again.  “Do me a favor and set my nose?  I always mess it up.”

I did my best to fix his nose, but it still looked a little crooked.  The man looked in a mirror and smiled.  “Better than I could do.  Thanks.”

“I suppose we should recycle the body now—” I began to say but the man cut me off.

“No.  Leave that to me.”

“But—”

“Please.  It’s my friend.”

“Very well.  Would you still like your food?”  I asked.

“No.”

I hesitated for a moment.  No human I knew ever turned down food after asking for it.  “I will leave you to your peace.”  Humans were so peculiar.  I was grateful to this man for saving our ship, but their fixation on the dead… Anyway, I had to recycle the body on the bridge floor.  I had known him for years, and filling the position he held would be difficult.  It could be done though.  As I left the room, I heard the human sobbing.