“What?”

“The target is a hu…”

“No, no. I heard what you said. I just… what? There’s no way in the galaxy anyone could be that monumentally stupid.”

“I was lead to believe that the ‘Black Hand Assassins’ could kill anything.”

“You keep that name out of your thrice-damned mouth around here whelp! We had to abandon that name after the bad deal with the Delpan Empire years ago.”

“I don’t care about any empire. I want you to kill a Human.”

The assassin’s mandibles clicked angrily in agitation.

“We don’t take contracts to kill Humans.”

“Then I’ll just contract someone else.”

“You can try. None of the other guilds in the galaxy will take that job. And, even if you found an independent with a death wish they won’t get the job done. Not without them either dying or ratting you out.”

“You can’t really believe that Humans are un-killable.”

“I never said they were un-killable. Quite the contrary, I personally know that they are definitely mortal, but we don’t take on contracts to kill them.”

“Why in all the Hells not?”

“Because the only way to kill a Human and live long enough to enjoy the money for the job is to drop a neutron bomb on them from orbit, just to be safe. Then, you grab the fastest ship you can and book it before the rest of the Humans find out what you did. After that, I suggest finding a way to another galaxy and staying there for the rest of your miserable life.”

“You’re having me on.”

“Tell me. Does the planet you come from have compulsory education?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Indulge me.”

“Yes. Ten years of basically teaching our young how to be as obedient as a Rastian drone.”

“Sounds about right for any government-run public education. You learn any history lessons there?”

“Some.”

“They must not teach galactic history then. Sit, buy a round and I’ll tell you why no assassin worth their blade will take on a contract to kill a Human.”

The drinks were ordered, and the old assassin took a long drag on his before he turned to his new drinking companion.

“You remember I mentioned the Delpan Empire?”

“Yes, what of it?”

“Do you know what happened to them?”

“Their empire broke after they poured too many resources into trying to tame a deathworld.”

“That deathworld is the Human cradle world. And the planet didn’t break the Delpan, the Humans did.”

“How?”

The assassin took another long drag of his beer.

The Delpan Empire used to rule this half of the galaxy. Hundreds of species and civilizations held in thrall or crushed into dust. ‘Serve or die’ that was the Delpan way.

The council that presided over what wasn’t Delpan territory back then could do little to stop the ever-churning war machine that drove Delpan expansion. They would posture and debate and even beg, but nothing they did could slow the inexorable march of the Delpan. System by system, the galaxy was falling under the rule of the Emperor.

Then, they happened upon a system that was called Sol by its inhabitants. The name wasn’t being used for any other system, so the Delpan let them keep it.

The Humans resided on the third planet in the system. Poor sods. They had just started really exploring their home system when the Delpan came knocking.

The Humans were divided into various socioeconomic groups that they called countries. This made it easier for the Delpan as the fractured nations of Humans were slow to respond, and the legions swept across the land without their next target being any wiser about their doom approaching thanks to communication jammers. Despite all these disadvantages, the Humans resisted mightily.

One galactic standard month. That’s how long it took for the Delpan to claim dominion over the planet. Most pre-FTL worlds fell within a week, but those Humans fought like demons, especially when the remaining countries finally figured out that they were being invaded. They even managed to bring the Delpan ground troops to a halt once, before reinforcements were dropped and the last bastion of resistance fell.

From there it was the usual boring administrative tedium. Splitting the new slaves into work groups and assigning them jobs that would ultimately benefit their new overlords. Many of the surviving Humans were farmers and ranchers, so the Delpan let them do what they were good at. ‘An army marches on its stomach’ I believe is the old Human saying. And the Delpan war machine was hungry indeed. A few hundred thousand were taken off-world to work in the mines elsewhere, those Humans are unnaturally strong and durable due to the high gravity of their world, so they excelled at the dangerous task of mining.

The worlds and species conquered by the Delpan usually followed a handful of events as though they were reading from the same script. First, there was a year or two where the overlords and administrators would have to be very liberal with the whip until the slaves learned the new order of things. Then there’d be a few years of relative peace, followed by a period of rebellions and uprisings five to ten years after the initial conquest. Once those were beaten down there usually wasn’t enough fight left to try again so the survivors just gave up hope.

These Humans didn’t follow the script. They grudgingly fell in line a few months after the invasion was done and when the expected uprisings never happened, I imagine the Delpan were feeling pretty proud of themselves for beating the fight out of the primates.

If I only had one compliment to give the Humans, it would be this; they are natural hunters. They know how to wait patiently for the perfect time to strike.

For twenty earth-years the Humans worked and lived and bred like Cling-rats. Not that the Delpan cared how many more Humans were being born, ‘more meat for the grinder’ they would say. They would even give incentives like extra rations and special privileges if a Human female produced more than four offspring. If only the Delpan knew; the Humans weren’t breeding more workers, they were growing an army.

The Human administrators and rulers that surrendered to the Delpan were at least half fake. Puppets, sent to give the illusion of surrender while the real governments hid underground (literally in some cases) and continued to direct their forces.

Hidden training camps, night-time schools, secretly printed pamphlets about how to one day throw off the chains of oppression. Those Humans were clever in hiding it all from their overlords. Then, when the Delpan war front was dozens of systems away on their conquest of the galaxy, it was time.

The Humans’ leaders, long hidden in their secret holes, had been planning while scraps of stolen Delpan tech were being meticulously reverse-engineered by their scientists. They had been gathering resources for their rebellion since they surrendered. While the Delpan had been gloating, the Humans were preparing. And now, finally ready, they made their move.

It was small at first, all rebellions are. A rogue miner refusing to work here, a rancher telling his overlord that his entire herd was wiped out by some non-existent disease there, a factory explosion over here. Larger disturbances to production soon followed.

The human country of France, with its long history of rebelling against tyrants, would riot in the streets while crying out ‘Vive la révolution!’ (don’t ask me what in the hells that means. I never bothered learning human languages). A crate of plasma rifles went missing. Then a grav-tank wouldn’t start, when they popped the hood, they found it to be completely gutted of all power and anti-grav components.

The Delpan leaders thought these problems were beneath them but still needed addressing, so they called the Black Hand Assassins and other guilds like ours to deal with the rabblerousers.

Our services cost the empire a tidy sum I can tell you. That planet of the Humans, ‘Dirt’ I think they call it, is at least three times the galactic average gravity. Every agent we sent had to be fitted with a grav-assist suit and spent a week after making planet-fall getting used to it.

At first, our agents thought that the Human rebels were ghosts. They could see the aftereffects of sabotage but never any evidence to prove who had done it. They would be patrolling streets when suddenly, the streets would empty. Before the agent could wonder where the Humans had all gone, an explosion would rock the street, sometimes taking the agent with it.

One of our agents got so angered by the death of a friend that he went to a random, completely unrelated town and started executing Humans when they couldn’t answer his questions about who was responsible. Unsurprisingly, a mob turned on him after the third execution and tore him to pieces. I can’t even blame the Delpan for not paying the death fee for that one; our contract was to stop riots, not cause them.

The contract was quickly going bad. Sure, we were killing humans like we were being paid to, with the kind of surgical precision we were known for. But what good is money if you can’t even make it off-world to spend it?

Before long we couldn’t walk on the surface of their planet without heavy escort by Delpan troops. The Humans would strike without warning and fade into the background. On the Human continent of Africa, an agent was lured onto the savanna as he was chasing one of the Human rebels, only to find himself set upon by a pack of feline predators. Those Humans had even wrangled the lesser beasts of their world into fighting! The number of agents we lost to the Humans’ canine companion species cannot easily be counted. And the less I say about the death trap the Humans call ‘Australia’, the happier I shall be.

First, one regional administration center fell silent, then another. By the time the Delpan nobles finally took notice of this new problem, the entire planet had fallen silent. And not just ‘Dirt’, but anywhere that a Human had been taken to work was showing similar signs of resistance. One can only assume that they had been fostering rebellious notions with the other slave species of the Delpan. The gods only know how they managed to communicate with each other across the void of space.

Before you say anything, yes. The Delpan did have patrol vessels meandering throughout the region to suppress just this kind of thing. But those had fallen silent too. The Humans had gotten spies aboard and either destroyed or captured the vessels. These too were sent to their scientists to be examined. And now, without Delpan supervision, the Humans uncovered the secret factories and forces they had been cultivating for years. Huge manufactories churning out components for space docks and eventually starships that the newly uncovered launch facilities hurled into orbit to the tune of several thousands of tons per day.

By the time the light response vessels made it to Human space, they were no match for the humble fleet the humans had managed to build with stolen Delpan technology.

It is no falsehood to say that the Delpan were victims of their own hubris. Every time they lost a response vessel or patrol fleet, they would just send another. They were too focused on expanding their borders to recognize the rot eating away at their empire from within. When the Delpan finally got tired enough of the cost of sending light response fleets into the area to pull a conquest fleet from the front, the Human world and the next three conquered systems in any direction had fallen silent. When the conquest fleet arrived ten systems out from Sol, they faced a fleet of not just Humans, but all of the slave species in the region.

After that victory for the Humans, the Delpan emperor must have been getting nervous. All of his fleets were halfway across the galaxy and the Humans were sat between him and his armies. An emergency call went out for all fleets to immediately recall directly to the imperial capitol and any guilds like the Black Hand were called in to assist.

By that time, we had lost almost two-thirds of our guild, so we refused the call. It ultimately saved us. The Humans, after decades of clandestine operations, were well-versed in ferreting out spies and saboteurs within their own ranks. Seven other assassin guilds were completely wiped out. We knew it was a fool’s errand no matter how much the empire was willing to pay.

While the Delpan fleet gathered in their home system, plans were made to meticulously spread out and scour the empire of the rebels. This ended up being the final nail in the coffin. You see, while the Delpan Empire consolidated and planned, the Humans spread quickly through the now enemy-free void and went to every subservient species in the empire, threw down the Delpan administrators controlling them and gathered them to the cause. Everywhere the humans went, they fanned the flames of rebellion, and the galaxy burned. The ineffective council in the part of the galaxy that had yet to be conquered by the empire had eagerly joined with the Humans in their fight.

Throughout the empire, the oppressed and enslaved were throwing off their shackles by the trillions and raising their fists in defiance. Forge worlds still churned out ships and Agri-worlds still raised crops and livestock, but for the new galactic alliance, not for the Delpan. Cut off from the supply lines that kept the Delpan Empire running, internal strife started to take hold within the Imperial forces.

Fleets of conquest went out from the imperial capitol and never made it more than a dozen systems before they were pounced upon by the Human alliance. Much like on their home world, the humans would strike like lightning and disappear into the black. Try as they did, the Delpan fleets were never quite able to pin down the humans in a fair fight.

This went on for months as the Delpan legions were slowly bled dry. Ambushes, false distress signals, EMP mines hidden in clouds of wreckage. Nothing was beneath the Humans so long as the enemy could be destroyed.

When the allied fleets finally breached Delpan prime, they found a starving and fractured fleet tearing itself to pieces. When the Human admiral hailed the fractured flotilla and the Delpan captains saw the sheer scale of the armada before them they surrendered straight away.

With the rebellion now finished, after three years of fighting, the Humans unleashed the most vicious weapon in their arsenal.

Lawyers.

They dragged the Delpan Emperor himself from his throne, and all of the Delpan nobles and administrators and lash-holders that had ever oppressed a sapient being were rounded up. And then the humans drug them through what is now our modern court system. It was far and away more civilized than Delpan court, where the accused would be brought before the emperor or a representative, charges would be read, and the accused would be shot without even the ability to defend themselves. By the time the trials were finished, the emperor had died of old age and his successor was made to right the wrongs done to the galaxy.

The Empire was broken and all that is left of the Delpan is a few systems in the far reaches of the galactic southern arm.

Many feared that the Humans would turn around and conquer the galaxy for themselves. However, within a year of the Delpan surrender, the Humans had dismantled over half of their fleet and scattered the rest around the galaxy for pirate hunting and general peacekeeping.

Our guild was extremely lucky that the Humans understood that we had broken our contract. They let us live with the promise that the Black Hand would be permanently dismantled. Those Humans whittled us down to a mere third of our number before the rebellion even left their home planet. A third! We were the top assassin guild in the galaxy and now, we are a loose unnamed group of independent agents.

“So, you see, young one, we don’t kill humans. You kill a human, and their family will hunt you down. If you kill their family, the species will hunt you down. And you had better pray they kill you, because if their lawyers get their hands on you, you’ll be lucky if your own people are forced to kill you as an apology.”

“I had no idea.”

“That is painfully obvious. I’m not usually one to pry into a customer’s business but, what did this human do to offend you anyway?”

“They insulted my broodmate.”

The assassin laughed.

“HA! Is that all? Then insult them back you moron. If it really bothered you then punch them in the face.”

“But, you said…”

“We don’t kill humans, but those crazy apes love to fight with words as well as their fists, and you’ll have a better chance of survival that way. Chances are you wouldn’t be able to physically hurt them but if you took the time to explain to them that you were offended, they may even apologize.”

“They would do that?”

“They are monsters on the field of battle and demons when they have been wronged, but they are not uncivilized. If they were, they couldn’t have rebuilt the council to what it is today. They hold the head chair position and will likely do so for generations to come. They are a firm race but fair in their adjudication.”

The assassin drained the last drops in his glass and looked balefully at the empty vessel.

“Now then, my cup is empty. Unless you wish to fill it again, I think we’re done here.”

Republished with permission from the author, Reddit user u/Krazywolve. Image created using Stable Diffusion.