[translated and changed a little bit from polish movie]
A: You want to attack humans?
B: Yes, their planet has some materials that I need
A: This one will be tough. On a daily basis humans are annoying, but they love when they are under attack! I'm telling you! In the first 5 days they're all going to start a resistance movement and turn into guerrillas! -- Anon Guest
[AN: NGL I want to see a dub of that Polish movie. I lack the fortitude for subtitles, please forgive]
Of course they came without warning. They always do. Even if there's one scruffy scientist type trying to warn them and being ignored. Empirical evidence has shown that a group of scientists, a plethora of the public, and a series of catastrophic events will be ignored if there's a fast buck in maintaining ignorance.
Of course they laid devastation in their wake. Mass panic, the stock market collapsing and, of course, the deaths of many of the common public. What grabbed the headlines was the stock market. Well. For as long as there were headlines. For the invading Klutarch, it was just another Wednesday[1].
The head of this particular Klutarch expedition was named Rollyx. They made certain everyone knew this, and put out notifications about it wherever they could. That's the only reason anyone on Earth knew their name. They, too, had been warned about Human nature. The tendency to ignore a prescient warning in favour of short-term profit is seemingly universal.
Naturally, Rollyx became a curse in the mouths of the survivors. Naturally, Humanity didn't stop there. Humans adapt. Humans learn. Well. The smart ones do. What was glanced at as petty thievery and semi-amusing incidents with "the natives" soon escalated into guerrilla warfare.
Small bands of Humans found their way into Klutarchian fortifications and made trouble. They caused problems. They quickly learned what caused the most amount of damage in the least amount of time with the fewest amount of Terran resources lost in the process.
Ordinary household chemicals can be very volatile under certain circumstances. People know that a mixture of rust and powdered aluminium can create the kind of fire that only a lack of oxygen can extinguish. The kind of fire that can melt its way through anything else. Like, say, deep-space rated armour plating on the Klutarchian flagship.
Witness a humble terracotta flowerpot. It could, if the bottom hole was plugged, contain perhaps two litres of fluid. What it contains now is an appreciable volume of brown powder that is completely inert. It also contains a candle. That candle will burn for some time.
Some significant effort went into getting that flowerpot and its contents into a very specific low-security area of the Klutarchian flagship. This area is gravitationally above a very specific and important part of the flagship's continuing function.
They were either too sure of their technology or too cheap to have redundancies. Either way, the candle is a small enough flame to be ignored. Since it is a low security area in a space where there is normally very little to burn, it will be some time before the flame even trips an alarm.
By then, it will be too late.
The candle has, at its very bottom and inside its wax, an interesting series of otherwise inert chemicals. Starting with "gun cotton" and ending in magnesium. When things go off, they will go off very quickly indeed.
The Humans are long gone, for a native holiday that will doubtlessly be a real one in the fullness of time.
One of the Humans who was more loyal to the Klutarchs than they should have been[2]. They, too, were ignored. Why let something as petty as an urgent warning get in the way of a well-established precedent.
The candle has been burning slowly for some time. Any anomalous heat signatures have been dismissed. Now that gentle flame hits some very ungentle incendiary products. Now, in seconds, that heat signature becomes very fast and very hot indeed. The alarms sound, but it's too late to stop it now.
The thermite, now ignited and molten, burns through the plating underneath it, melting the terracotta on the way. It drips through to some very important key components, rendering the flagship inoperable. It burns through the plating underneath that and starts a lot of fires on the way.
There's still an argument concerning whether or not the thermite burned through the exterior hull or the fire suppression systems kicked in before the Klutarchian flagship suffered a critical and fatal failure state and its death spiral towards somewhere in the Pacific Oceans[3]. Not enough of the wreckage has been recovered to make a definitive call.
There was enough wreckage recovered for Humanity to learn very quickly about interstellar flight.
Humans are very, very good at flipping the script.
The Klutarch Empire is about to get a very fast lesson in listening to warnings.
We can only hope that the Humans learn it in parallel.
[1] They didn't call it Wednesday. The Klutarch had no knowledge of, nor inclination to learn, the Terran calendar or Terran names for things.
[2] This, too, happens with alarming regularity. The rest of their people, family, friends, and so forth will somehow be miraculously spared if they are loyal and devoted to the enemy forces currently destroying the world they know and love. It never works, but some people keep trying it anyway.
[3] There are two of them. The North and South Pacific Oceans. It is therefore the only ocean on the planet that is a plural.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / iDesign]
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