“Urburburr Burrub, Officer, here to be emplaced with the 5th Human Exosolar Unit.”
I did my best to imitate a human salute like I had seen others give while standing in line, but my chitin simply does not flex as well as human dermal sheathing, nor do my shoulders join in the same way. The human with the tablet who was directing the queue of soldiers disembarking raised an eyebrow at my salute, so I suspected I had either done well enough to be respectable, or done poorly enough to be humorous. With humans, it might well be both.
She looked down at the tablet and tapped it a couple of times, then looked up. “Urb Oversight and Information Committee?” When I buzzed assent, she rotated the tablet on that extremely flexible human wrist of hers and presented it to me while reciting regulations in a somewhat bored tone, a chilling feat considering the subject of her recitation. “Please note that emplacement with a human combat unit is dangerous. Exosolar Command provides no warranty in regards to your safety and security beyond the best-intentioned efforts of the unit you are emplaced with. I am to remind you of case file #01-03: Human Diplomatic First Contact as an example of the dangers you face. Please indicate your understanding by inputting your identification code.”
I did my best to control the nervous flutter of my wings. Humanity’s first contact was infamous. The ritual greetings were exchanged and explained in their meaning, and then the visiting human diplomat offered a hand. The Kolo who was their first diplomatic contact had unwisely gripped that hand without knowing the ritual in question, and the human had promptly crushed it in their vise-like grip.
There were many dangerous species in the galaxy, but only humans were capable of being dangerous by accident.
I buzzed my agreement flatly and tapped my identification code out on the screen with my antenna, something that seemed to cause more than a little disgust in the human holding the tablet and, to judge by the muttering around me, more than a few of the other humans around me.
The human took her tablet back, and to her credit, she did not immediately wipe the surface clean, something I had noticed other humans do after I touched an item they were handling. “Please confirm the following facts from your ID file verbally: You have a universal translator either installed or otherwise secured on your person that will be on at all times. You have received the Human Contact Disease Vector shot or implant as according to your immune system. You will be serving for no less than one Earth solar orbit.”
She paused to tap her tablet and look closely at it, then continued, “You will be joining the HEU-5 at this station, from which you will be traveling with them to…” Another pause. “Bur-Ur-Burr-ur-bur-U, there to assist them in interacting with the local inhabitants as needed. Your duty also includes watching humans for infractions of interstellar and local laws, but does not include enforcement of those laws, only the prompt reporting of them to the authorities of both the HEU-Command and the authorities of other governments according to your better judgment. Your duty permits, but does not require, participation in combat, according to your better judgment.”
I buzzed in consent with each item as presented, but stopped on that last one. “I have no arms or armor,” I said, slightly nervous at the idea of experiencing human-style combat. “I was informed I would be equipped on location as needed?”
The woman paused and gave me a smile, something I had not yet experienced from a human. Unlike my own kind, humans had soft and flexible facial features, including lips and eyelids that existed mostly to protect and cover their sensory systems, but were also used to express emotions. The smile I was being given was large and full of teeth, and it did not make me feel comforted or safe in the least, contrary to what I understood a smile to be. “That will be taken care of by the HEU-5 quartermaster.” The dangerous smile faded, to be replaced with the same cold, professional non-expression she had been using previously. “Please look at the floor. There is a series of lines there with no gaps between them. Can you see the third colored line from the left?”
I looked down and buzzed in assent. There was a series of colored lines that started on one side of the human’s station and seemed to lead off in various directions. There were a couple of gaps in those lines, which I suspect were filled with colors my own species could not perceive.
“Good. Please follow that line to its end. Do not deviate from the line. That will lead you to an armory. Please enter that room and do not leave until a member of HEU-5 orders you to. Do not touch any weapon or item that you are not certain you know the use of without authorization from a member of HEU-5. These instructions are for your own safety.”
I buzzed one last time and started to follow the line, only to pause. I had an odd sensation, as if I was being watched closely, and I turned to see the woman staring at me with a distant look on her face. I waved my antenna slightly in her direction, not a full inquiry, but just an expression of curiosity amongst my kind.
The woman smiled again, and this time, the smile was non-threatening. I could not really explain why it was less threatening. The shape of her odd lips, maybe, or the amount of teeth visible. Or maybe it was her eyes, slightly narrowed but not drawing down her brow. For whatever reason, this second smile struck me as a genuine expression of goodwill. “Good luck, Burrub,” she said.
I buzzed gratitude, sweeping my antenna back as an emotional intensifier, and the woman’s smile grew slightly in return. She then turned back to her tablet, calling for the next in line, a large and thickly muscled human male like most of the other occupants of the hanger, and I returned to following the line.
———————————–
The line was a lot longer than I had expected. Its path was as straight as anything generally found on space stations, passing through the primary access corridor that ran along the outer edge of the disk. It was my first time interacting with a Terran-preferred artificial biome, and it was… interesting. Where the homeworld of the Urb was filled with low and wide overgrowth, with two distinct layers of life separated by the broad leaves of the low-lying bushes, humans had incredibly tall trees, which came in an astounding variety of body and leaf shapes. Many different species had been planted in the access corridor, in planters surrounded by benches suitable for human use, and very few of those benches were empty.
Humans eating combined foods, meats and vegetation surrounded by lumps of material made by some unknown process and wrapped in paper. Humans using their dexterous little fingers to type on tablets, flip through impossibly thin sheets of paper, or shuffle and deal sets of playing cards. Old humans covered in wrinkles and looking deceptively thin, and small humans with unusual body proportions that indicated they were larval forms.
In a way, I was lucky. I had not received the full training program the Oversight and Information Committee usually gave to its service members before emplacement. BurUrBurrurburUrb could not wait for full training to take place, embroiled as it was with the invasion. They needed help, and while the HEA and the UOIC both required observers on site, they technically did not require those observers to be trained. I had spent some time working at a trading station, which had given me some small experience with interacting with aliens. When things came to a head, I was a natural choice to join and observe the humans coming to aid us.
The purple line continued on and on, and my attempt to follow it went from a pleasant stroll to a burdensome march, something made all the worse for my gait. Urb naturally fly when traveling long distances, or run on all six limbs when moving about, but I had been warned when getting my assignment that humans reacted poorly to both, and that I should get used to walking upright to get around. Considering the odd looks I was getting as I passed the humans, especially those who were eating, I would be sure to send my gratitude for that advice back to the recruiter when I had a moment. I had spent a few day cycles practicing an upright walk, and while it was difficult and moved my hind legs in a way they were ill-accustomed to, I was capable of doing so. I could only imagine the reaction to more natural movement.
After ten “minutes”, according to my human-style chronometer, the line turned sharply towards the outer edge of the station. From there, things became tighter, more crowded. Humans in these halls did not sit around and relax. They moved quickly, with long-legged strides, unhurried and yet moving faster at a swift walk than most species could without serious effort. I found myself gently but firmly nudged aside countless times, each time receiving the phrase “excuse me” from the human doing the nudging. It was only after the fifth or sixth time that I realized they were apologizing for moving me.
The very idea that I would be offended was mind-boggling. Urb nests were crowded and chaotic places. Slow-moving members who stood idly in a busy walkspace would be nudged aside without a word, if not picked up and carried with the flow. Yet such casual and necessary physical contact was apparently a source of apologies in human spaces. If anything, my aching legs and thorax would have appreciated being carried.
It took another five minutes, and countless unneeded apologies, before the line turned once more and terminated at a door. I paused as I drew near and boggled at it. It was little more than a huge hunk of solid material, mounted on chunky hydraulics that could separate my head from my thorax with casual ease were they to break loose. The translation cover over my leftmost eye lit up, telling me that the door was clearly labeled, in big red letters, as the armory, while smaller black text on a white placard also informed me this was an emergency shelter capable of…
I shuddered, my wings fluttering slightly. This armory was apparently capable of becoming self-sufficient in the face of a catastrophic failure of the station’s atmosphere. The signs indicated its maximum warp speed was sufficient to travel to a nearby planet. It was a lifeboat, full of human weapons. Presumably also full of humans if it was to be used that way.
That a simple lifeboat could be more deadly than many warships was something both awesome and dreadful to consider.
I held out my right topmost arm, presenting my identification chip to the scanner in the door, and hopped back nervously when those powerful hydraulics suddenly made a squealing noise and lifted the thick door up to the ceiling. The room inside was long and narrow, with a wired cage that split the room in half. Behind that cage stood a human male.
There was something off-putting about the man. He was shorter than many of the other humans I had seen, but thick in any other direction of measurement and weighed down by clearly visible musculature. From under one of the soft headshades they commonly used, a pair of beady eyes stared at me as if I was still alive only because disposing of my body would be a greater inconvenience than simply tolerating my presence, and even as I watched, he inhaled loudly, his chest visibly swelling.
“Why are you standing in the doorway, maggot! In! In! In!”
I darted forward, instinctively swapping to a more natural six-legged gait, which was apparently the wrong move to make. “Get up off the f**king ground! You can’t carry your f**king gun like that!” I stumbled upright and held up a hand so I could correct him about my carrying capacity, but I apparently failed yet another test I was not aware I was taking, because his face started to change from a warm brown to a dark red. “I did not ask you to speak, and this ain’t school, so put that f**king arm down!”
He stepped to one side and ripped open the door to the wired-off section, his thumping steps making the floor shift and flex slightly. He stomped up to me with a thin wooden board in his hand, covered with a pad of paper and a primitive writing device on a wire. “I am guessing, what with the spare limbs and the little head wigglers, that you are our new UOIC? You may answer that question verbally!”
It took me a moment to realize he was asking a genuine question instead of just shouting at me, with the same tone and volume being used for both kinds of communication. That brief moment only caused his skin to grow even darker, and I hurriedly buzzed my assent.
“That’s not an answer I want to hear, Crawley! The correct response when asked a question by a superior is ‘Sir, Yes Sir’, in whatever language you speak! So, let us try this again! Are you our new UOIC?”
Urb does not have a language as concise as the human dialect being used, and no equivalent to the male-gendered respectful acknowledgment, but I did my best and responded with “Patriarchal Member, I acknowledge your order, Patriarchal Member”. I will admit, I have no idea what exactly my translator actually said to the man, but it must have been impressive indeed to cause the man to give me such a chilling smile.
“Outstanding!” The translator stuttered for a moment when it attempted to parse something unusual about the man’s syntax that countered the literal meaning of the word used, with the end result apparently being along the lines of “Good job, you disappointment.”
The man used the wooden board like a scoop, shoving me into the back area with a shockingly gentle touch that I didn’t notice at the time, terrified as I was. That pressure pushed me in front of a large rack filled with human weapons.
“I am Gunnery Sergeant Harold Weaver, and I will be your guide to the thrilling world of human military operations! You will refer to me as ‘Sir’ until you have demonstrated that you have both the cranial capacity to understand what my rank really is, as well as the intestinal fortitude to not dump your biological waste when addressed by me! Is all that clear?”
My response of “Patriarchal Member, I acknowledge your order, Patriarchal Member” did not have a positive effect, as the man started grunting repeatedly at me after my response. The noise stopped, and the man gave me a bare-toothed aggressive smile.
“Look at you! You’re already half a man! And as such, I will reward you with half a man’s weapon!” He reached into the rack and pulled out a long metal tube, which he promptly held out at the height of my head. “This is the barrel of your personal Mark 48 Machine gun! You’ll get the other half when I think you can use it!”
I reached out with both arms to take the tube, only to discover when Harold let go of it that it was far heavier than I could hold in such a way. It hit the floor with a loud clang, and even as I bent over to pick it up the Sergeant was shouting at me. In hindsight, the fact that he also helped me up should have been a clue to what was happening, carefully gripping my arm at the joint to test it for injury, but the verbal tirade never stopped long enough for me to really think.
“Now, we can’t be having a brave bug like you getting injured, so we’d best get you kitted out with some body armor!” A long outfit was draped across my shoulders and down my thorax, heavy enough to make even six-legged movement slower.
“You’re going to burn up a lot of calories carrying all that stuff! Good thing a good soldier always packs rations!” I could barely lift my head, so I didn’t see what he did, but the weight increased across my back.
“And on those cold nights in the snow, nothing keeps you safe and warm like a tent!” With this last addition, I staggered slightly. Standing upright was simply beyond my capabilities, no matter how the Sergeant shouted at me, and even standing on all six of my legs left me shaky and quickly tiring.
He eventually gave up on the shouting and crouched down next to me. “Now that you are properly kitted out as a human soldier, it’s time to meet your unit! You will now take your equipment and follow the red line to the loading bay.” He waved a hand at the back of the room, causing a small load carrier drone to roll forward on treads. “This little fella will keep you company during your trip. It’ll pick up anything you drop. Don’t you dare let it pick anything up, or I am going to stop being so charming and friendly. Am I clear?”
I grunted in understanding.
“That’s not how we answer a question! Am! I! Clear?!”
“Patriarchal Member, I acknowledge your order, Patriarchal Member,” I managed to say. This satisfied the Sergeant, who nodded once and pointed out the door. I pulled myself out, my abdomen dragging across the floor, and looked down at the red line.
Then I looked up at the red line.
It ran straight ahead until it was out of sight, lost to the curve of the station.
I started to drag myself forward.
———————————–
I woke up on the floor, unable to remember falling down in the first place. I didn’t even know how far I had followed the line. Eventually, I had grown so tired that even the idea of measuring my distance was simply not worth the energy it would take to look up. I stopped hearing the polite apologies from other humans, the annoying hum of the cart drone, the…
The cart drone! There was no weight on my back, it must have taken all of my equipment!
I jerked my limbs, looking around wildly, only for a strong hand to hold me down. I looked up to see the Sergeant sitting next to me, one hand keeping me still, and the other holding two tubes towards me. One was filled with water, and the other was filled with Rubururbur paste.
I sat up and snatched them from his unresisting hand, ripping them open and consuming them as quickly as I could. I was never a laborer, you must understand. I was an academic, and had an academic’s body. I’d never been so hungry, so thirsty, so tired as I was when I was laying on the floor of that human station, sucking down the most calorie-heavy food the Urb produced fast enough to make me queasy.
Then a heavy hand fell gently across my back.
“You did good there, Burrub,” the Sergeant said, his voice calm.
I buzzed in annoyance, antenna as flat as they could get in my reclined position. “Do not placate me. I was assigned a simple task and failed.”
This did not get the reaction I expected. Instead of more shouting, or calm words, the Sergeant started grunting again, loudly enough this time for my translator to pick up on it It translated it as the hum of a good joke.
“Do you know how much all that weighed?” he asked between grunts. I buzzed a negative, causing his grunting to renew. “I gave you almost 30kg of equipment, and the line runs for 5km. I never expected you to get to the end.”
That caused me to sit up, my antenna waving in surprise. The translator gave me the measure of the weight in terms of equivalent water volume, and the result was almost twice what I thought I could carry, never mind for a distance I would have difficulty walking comfortably while unencumbered. “Still” I said, turning my head aside, “it’s nothing like what you humans can do.”
The Sergeant stopped grunting in humor and gave me a friendly smile. “I want to show you something. Think you can stand up without any weight?”
I buzzed agreement, and with a little discreet help, I staggered upright. The Sergeant led me over from the wall I had been laying near to the red line. A dash had been made on the line with a black marker, and written on the floor, in big block letters, was “Urburburr, 30kg, 0.9km.”
“That’s where I found you,” the Sergeant said, rubbing at the line with his foot. “Before you, the next best Urb that came through here only made it 0.7km with a load of 25kg, and that was just where they gave up and dropped their gear. Almost all the Urb drop their gear at some point. Why didn’t you?”
I found myself lost for words. Why did I bother trying? I knew my limits, and even without the weight heavy enough to press me to the ground, I could never have walked the entire way to wherever that red line went to. “I didn’t want to give up,” I said, rubbing my foremost limbs together in agitation. “Humans are strong and durable and agile, in ways I am not. I could never match your abilities, but… I didn’t want to disappoint.”
The Sergeant gave me a surprisingly gentle pat on the back. “Before we send anyone out with our soldiers, we need to see what they are like as a person. When given a difficult task, do they give up? When things look rough, or even impossible, do they half-ass the job and go home? Or do they walk, crawl, and drag themselves every last inch they can? You walked until you fell, and when I caught up, you were still trying to drag yourself forward by the only limb you managed to work free.”
He smiled, a clearly cheerful smile, and gave me another pat. “We wanted an Urb who might fight for their home as hard as we will, and you did not disappoint”.
———————————–
I learned something important that day. Many political groups try to label humans as a primitive and violent species, which is admittedly accurate. They generally also try to claim that humans look down on us for our comparative physical weakness, and that is ludicrous.
I have had humans chant my name as I consumed a mere ten percent of a standard human alcoholic drink. I’ve had humans cheer as I lifted weights that made my limbs creak, after watching those same humans lift them easily in one hand. Humans have helped me off the ground after I ran an incredible distance with words of congratulations, only to run twice that same distance afterward without faltering. Humans have given their lives to protect mine.
Humans generally do not care how much you can carry, or how long you can run, or how much intoxication you can handle. They know they are stronger, faster, and more durable than nearly any being in the universe, and none of that matters to them. All that you must do is try, as hard as you can, at everything you can, and you will earn their respect. And there is nothing more helpful than a human who respects you.
Republished with permission from the author, Reddit user Bignholy. You can comment on the original story here. Image created using Stable Diffusion.