"I remember when the humans defeated the Kress Imperium; I'll remember it until I breathe my last. Do you remember it my old friend?" There was no answer from the bed next to me. "I'm sure you do, you were there after all. The war had started when I was only one cycle old. I remember when our race first discovered yours. We had stumbled on a colony during a standard mapping expedition. rather than try to make contact at that time our Grand Imperator sent a full honor fleet and our Prime Delegate.
To this day no one truly knows what went wrong or who fired first. What we do know for sure was that a lucky, or rather unlucky, shot had hit the Prime Delegate's flagship killing him and the Fleet Commander instantly. It didn't help that the Prime Delegate was also the Imperator's first born. Shortly after that the entire colony's defensive fleet was in ruins. In a fit of rage the fleet Sub-Commander had the entire colony burned to ashes and just like that, we were at war."
How you humans managed to resist us so long was almost as maddening as how you won the war. Your ships were slow, their shield were weak and their weapons were underpowered. The only thing you had going for you was your cunning and your ability to reproduce.
No matter how many colonies we burned, no matter how many ships we destroyed there seemed to be an endless amount of reinforcements for you to send in their place. Your capacity to build fleets was like nothing we had seen before. You also fought every battle with a stubborn determination that has never been matched by over 100 races we have encountered in this galaxy. You would send 15 of your ships to destroy one of ours and when that didn't work, you would send 50.
But in the end even that was not enough. After nearly a cycle of war we finally saw a change. You were less likely to engage us in direct battles, preferring raids and hit and run tactics. When you did choose to fight us your fleets were smaller and seemed to be less willing to commit to a full on attack. The war council had thought that you had finally reached the point where you were no longer capable of resisting. How wrong they were.
I was a Signals sub-officer, just out of primary training and barely two cycles or roughly 40 of your Earth years old. I was working in the War Council's tactical center. They were discussing their next steps in the war and trying in vain to determine where your homeworld might be. Suddenly our long range sensors picked up a group of ships jumping into real space just outside our defensive grid.
We knew they were human but didn't recognize the ship configuration. There were only 12 of them and as they slowly made their way forward we didn't even think to open fire. The ships were small and looked as if they had been cobbled together out of debris and wreckage. It almost seemed as if they were lost and wanted to surrender to us until they opened fire.
Their weapons were pathetically weak, but they took us by surprise. Before our defensive weapons could return fire they had done heavy damage to our main long range sensors. Of course they didn't get off a second shot. All but one of the ships were instantly vaporized. The last one tried to flee but it's engines overheated and melted the aft half of the ship. Instantly the council ordered our Learners to get to work.
That was the one thing we picked up from you during the war. The limited number of victories you had, had given you the chance to study us and our technology. You took our weapons and attempted to reverse engineer them. The result was something between your weapons and ours, but it was certainly more effective. You also studied how we fought and adapted to us as much as you could.
Our ways have always been rigid, you once said that we lacked imagination. But now we tried to use your own methods against you. We studied the wreckage of your "fleet" but couldn't find much use. The ships were actually cobbled together out of mismatching parts and there were no survivors to interrogate. At the end of our Learner's report, just an addendum really, was that the sole surviving ship had two designations.
Your ship names were rather much more colorful than ours, those that were intact enough for us to study at least. The one surviving ship was named the "Folly" but right under it, stenciled on the buckled hull of the bow was 1-12. We thought that it was simply a numerical designation of that ship in the group and ignored it.
Transcribed by u/IUpvoteUsernames in Reddit