Humans are awful at war, concluded envoy Ö-Three-Eyes in her first assessment of the newly integrated species’ ability to reliably defend their corner of the Orion Arm.

In a vacuum, without the Great Chain knocking at the metaphorical door, it would have been an interesting conundrum. Compared to its neighbours, humankind didn’t lag behind in technology. Their understanding of the universe was roughly on par with that of most Agora species, and while they were a few generations behind when it came to biotechnologies, their material science was nothing to scoff at. Visiting their fifty-odd worlds, Ö-Three-Eyes witnessed many feats of engineering that humans had every right to be proud of. She saw geoscale wind-wheels in their gas giants, fusion lanterns warming up icy worlds, O’Neill cylinders housing millions of inhabitants, space elevators stretching out from their garden planets, faster-than-light spaceships glittering at the edge of reality, trailing hyperluminal wakes between the stars.

One thing, however, was strangely absent: weapons. It wasn’t that humans didn’t have conflicts — in a rather amusing episode, Ö-Three-Eyes found herself involved in a five-way squabble between human communes, ending up in a close pass between two several terawatt-strong fusion-powered ships. Simply, they didn’t seem to have wars. Laser grids on their ships were limited to asteroid defence, the only missiles she could find were used as launchers and particle beams were nowhere to be found. Their ground forces were effectively nonexistent and, safe for a few ballistic submarines lurking beneath the oceans, the humans didn’t seem to have much in the way of planetary defences. The only martial activity they entertained were “Flower Wars” — pretend conflicts that served more as spectacle than anything else.

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