We knew them. The humans were part of the United Planetary Coalition for hundreds of years by the time we were confronted by the Brosc. Humans were scavengers, hagglers, pirates, and all around an affront to intergalactic sentience. Even their official diplomats, military bodies, and leading minds were little better than the apes they’d evolved from. They were the only race known whose people would go to war amongst themselves. And when UPC peacekeepers stepped in to dispel the fighting, some human faction would always complain in council of the UPC picking sides, even when all anyone did was disarm both sides and introduce neutral arbiters to aid negotiations.

Their ships were garbage. Their medical knowledge was rudimentary. Their physical prowess was… lacking, they being hairless apes with little more than an impressive bite force to show for any natural weaponry. Their societies were bickering, inefficient messes of poorly placed priorities and wildly abused appropriations of funding. Their languages – yes, more than one – were improvised messes, seemingly designed with the express purpose of terminating translation AIs.

In short, the humans were a nuisance most members of the UPC felt had gotten into the Coalition by riding the coattails of their barely-qualifying civilization status, as well as their admittedly impressive feat of attaining FTL alone prior to first contact.

We knew them, and we thought very lowly of them.

So when the Brosc showed up and sterilized three UPC worlds, one of which was the only inhabited world of one fledgling member race, and the call for military conscription was sent out seeking a first string of voluntary participants, we were surprised when the first three responses were from humans. When the rare conscription call went out among the UPC, you expected a response from member governments, and each member would provide its standing army, and give civilians the opportunity to enlist for service. But that’s not what the humans did, or not exclusively anyway. It was not human worlds or leaders who replied so swiftly. Those first responses came from two pirate ships and a scrap station. A damned stationary scrap station volunteered to the UPC council for service. Of the fifty-six responses that came in the first day, fully forty-seven of them were from human crews, stations, outposts, and one from the actual human leadership. It was an embarrassing show of ineptitude, and reinforced in many member races’ minds that humans were good for little more than spur of the moment, chest-thumping acts of enthusiastic violence.

The number of their replies should not have filled us with hope for their turnout. Nevertheless, expecting nothing, we were still disappointed with the number of ships that were mustered. One hundred and ninety-three ships turned up, seventy-five of which were official military. Even the Grell, a monoplanetary species who were generally regarded basically as pacifists, managed to bring three hundred and sixty proper ships to bear. It was such a lackluster showing, UPC command didn’t bother to incorporate them into any of the main squadrons. Humanity was offered a role we thought they’d like better anyway – bounty hunters and privateers. Take down Brosc ships, turn in the bounty for pay. We were surprised at their almost childish response. Human command sulked, but didn’t argue.

What followed for humanity was… truly embarrassing. UPC repair docks and med bays reported constant visits from human ships, sometimes having to issue repairs on the same ship just days apart. The damage was always disastrous and obviously one-sided. No one ever wanted to point out the most shameful evidence in the repairs – the bulk of hull damage seemed to be on the tails of their ships. They were incompetent, yes, but more than that they were cowards. Contrary to this, however, was the human disregard for personal well-being. Humans brought in for medical attention would ignore the advice of medical professionals and would be hobbling back onto their ships on crutches or with heavy bandages or splints still wrapping the injury in mere days or weeks after treatment. It was a joke at repair and med bays that the three things you could count on finding in a UPC port was food, quarter, and a human wreck.

The war lasted two years. Paltry. The Brosc turned out to be inferior opponents, never able to hold strategic positions for long and never able to reclaim them when lost. The average duration of UPC wars was thirty years, thanks to the challenge of holding and fortifying a battlefront that spanned interstellar distances. These sorts of things tended to spend some time in deadlocked stalemates until some carefully calculated play finally broke the line somewhere. Usually you expected some major losses planetside along the front, but there were no civilian casualties here apart from the instigating destruction of the three UPC worlds. Of course, the Brosc hadn’t gone down without a fight. In fact, they managed to average three UPC ship destructions for every one of their own. Nevertheless, their planetary defense systems, ship construction, and distribution of firepower across the front were weak and amateur.

The human force had lost 50% of their ships and suffered heavy casualties in the end. In addition, they never managed to turn in a single bounty. If not for the human loss, they would have been reprimanded and possibly taxed to recoup the drain on repair and medical resources they’d caused so fruitlessly.

The Brosc and its allies signed their surrender grudgingly. A human diplomat was in attendance per council protocol. As the Brosc was escorted away, he passed the human and spat at her feet. We thought it was a random act of bad sportsmanship. The human smirked at the passing Brosc. This too was viewed as in poor taste.

It took another year to disarm the Brosc and collect reparations. In the years following, we pored over confiscated Brosc intel. Deciphering so much encrypted data from so many battlefields was a process. The coded radio and audio transmissions were the first data we could reliably listen to. We were surprised to find constant reference in Brosc communications to “the Bloodletter.” It appeared in Brosc communications from every major battle, every minor skirmish, and in relation to acts of sabotage and espionage throughout the war. By Brosc accounts, this Bloodletter was a boogeyman. It showed up so often, it was taken as Brosc code for any UPC force which was to be considered a top threat.

Word of the Bloodletter spread through the UPC military ranks, despite the information’s confidential nature. Any leaked Bloodletter feat was shared around, and hundreds of soldiers proudly laid claim to each one. “The Bloodletter crippled the Brosc defensive platforms at Ericor 9? It could only have been our Gorlo Squadron! We rained plasma down on them at the third battle and finally punched through!” could be heard at one Atrac base while lightyears away a Nonolin soldier boasted “sounds like we were Bloodletters to those Brosc filth. Did you hear about how we took out their defensive platforms at Ericor 9?” And so it went. By the time we cracked Brosc video comms, it seemed half of the UPC was crewed by Bloodletters. It was painted on hulls by proud and rowdy soldiers, it was a title given to retiring heroes, and it was the assumed name of not a few newly founded special forces teams.

We knew them, the humans. They were our embarrassing cousins, our incapable undesirables. That’s what we thought.

No doubt human pirates and soldiers alike were being mocked and spat on, even these years after the war, in a hundred ports in a hundred star systems in the very same moment we saw our first decrypted Brosc video relay. It was the feed from one of the biggest theatres of the war. Our first clue that all would not be as it appeared was that the timestamp was too early, by ten days. The video came on, and UPC intelligence and command watched through Brosc eyes for the first time.

It wasn’t much. It was a security cam at a Brosc hangar. A dozen Brosc destroyers were nearing completion. Suddenly, there was a flurry of panicked activity as construction teams fled the ships. A ship blitzed by and torched every destroyer, raining hell from a passing lightning bolt. The feed died. It had been 15 seconds of video, and it definitely wasn’t possible to make out the ship that had done the bombing raid. It matched no UPC combat reports.

The second video was when the truth began to come to light. This was a destroyer surveillance array. It was chasing a ship, visible only as a spot of white light as its thrusters dominated the footprint of the ship on screen. The destroyer was unleashing a withering fire as it chased the smaller ship at non-compliant speeds for an in-atmo dogfight. The ship comm chatter was a garbled, layered mess. But one word was being called out occasionally by every party to the comm link:

“Bloodletter.”

The destroyer managed to land a square hit that broke shielding on the small vessel, and Brosc comm officers repeated the triumphant status report. Target’s fusion core: ruptured. Shields: offline. Energy weapons systems: low capacity. FTL drive: offline. This Bloodletter, it seemed, was one the Brosc had managed to terminate.

Or so it seemed. Not a minute later, after weathering brutal fire without shields, the ship pulled up sharply, as if to escape and flee the planet. The destroyer gave chase. And just when both ships were blistering through the atmosphere, perpendicular to gravity, something was jettisoned from the small ship. Brosc comms chattered about it passively, assuming the ship was getting rid of weight. By the time the alarm was sounded when they realized what it was, it was too late. The last report before the feed died was this. “Jettisoned cargo identified as terminal fusion core! Pull away! REPEAT: Jettisoned cargo is–!” The Bloodletter vessel jettisoned its own core. It wasn’t exactly a nuclear weapon, but there was definitely a lot of unstable energy looking for a way out. The Bloodletter ship engaged its thrusters on reserve energy to spin on its axis. When it had turned around completely, it fired just one low-power blast and righted itself to its forward-facing position and kept flying. The bolt of energy pierced the core, which must have been bootstrapped with a small explosive, and the core exploded just meters from the Brosc destroyer. The feed terminated.

In the brief moment where the ship had spun around, one clear profile shot came into view.

The ship was human.

As video was decrypted, parsed out, and chronolized over the coming months, humans humiliated us one last time. But this time, it was not because we were ashamed. Nor because we were sweeping the primitive race under the rug in embarrassment. No, this time, it was because one hundred and ninety-three ships – now known to have been about 90% of humanity’s combat-capable interstellar ships – were there spread out through the theatre of war, making savage, daring strikes on strategic targets at every major Brosc stronghold with no backup since we’d denied them squadron support. In many cases, they struck alone before the UPC fleet even showed up, picking off production centers, supply chains and caches, communication relays, and sometimes even performing impossible strikes against Brosc flagships in ships pieced together from junk and held together with twine and prayer. Then the UPC would sweep in and play at war, never realizing how much easier their jobs had been made.

Bloodletter wasn’t code for priority targets. Bloodletter was the name given to an unknown race of wartime geniuses. To suicidal daredevils. To the species who could shake off the fatal wounds of war with only brief recovery periods.

The Bloodletters were the soldiers silently picking off Brosc cruisers so that UPC ships could escape unfavorable engagements. The Bloodletters were the ones putting boots on the ground and unpowering planetary defenses. The Bloodletters were the pirates who boarded enemy flagships and jettisoned Brosc commanders before jamming comms, setting cores to blow, and fleeing the scene before the UPC warped in for war. The Bloodletters were the ones gift-wrapping supply ships full of fuel and medical supplies for UPC boarding parties.

The Bloodletters were the ones liberating Brosc slave ships, decimating the Brosc fighting numbers. The Bloodletters were the ones who took the Brosc capital. The Bloodletters were the ones who forced Brosc command to issue their surrender, holding a gun to the back of the Brosc tyrant as he broadcast the declaration.

The Bloodletters were singularly human.

The UPC had spent years patting itself on the back for a war well-fought. We were slapping medals on the chests of soldiers who’d scraped up the humans’ leftovers. We venerated commanders who punched through defensive lines that humans had crippled days prior. We celebrated a job well-done and didn’t even invite humanity to the table.

Humans turned a stone cheek to the mocking and abuse and derision of soldiers, traders, politicians, and civilians across the sector. They never collected one bounty. They never demanded one particle of gratitude. They never retaliated. Not one pirate stepped forward to take credit.

When the truth was out, UPC representatives visited the human capital world to offer a public declaration of recognition and a substantial gift in gratitude. A monument had been erected there in the capital by human artists. It was the three sterilized worlds that had suffered before anyone could respond to the threat, each carried and cradled by “angels”, human myths, guardians of the souls of the dead. A message was written there; an epitaph for three worlds to whom humanity owed nothing: “Grant them rest; we will erect a sword of fire to guard the resting place.”

They politely but firmly turned away the representatives and the gift.

We knew them, now, finally. They were pirates. They were cunning. They were thieves. They were a bickering, inefficient, violent people.

And they honorably, selflessly spared countless people on both sides of the war from the fire.

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By /u/BossScribblor on /r/HFY