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The admiral paced the deck of the warship, his tentacles crossed behind his thorax. He was feeling uneasy. On the wall-sized view screen nearby, the massed cruisers of the Vuldrian armada sped through the void of interstellar space at many times the speed of light, though in the field of tangible darkness they appeared to hang in silent formation.
The side door of the control room released a hiss of air as it slid open and three petty officers entered, escorting the alien prisoner between them. They tried to push the alien to the floor, but their attempt merely shoved it slightly forward, its sturdy lower appendages supporting it despite the creature’s height and top-heaviness. The creature turned around and stared at them and the officers backed up a few steps, tentacles reaching for their laser pistols. The prisoner made no move to escape, however, and after a moment turned back toward the admiral.
The alien was bipedal and solid, with thick, meaty limbs protruding from a flesh-covered trunk and further areas of padding scattered over its body. It had an uncanny amount of balance and dexterity for something with its mass. It towered over the smaller Vuldrian admiral.
The admiral reached up to activate the universal translator device attached to his uniform and addressed the prisoner.
“Greetings,” he said.
There was no reply. The alien simply stared down at him with disturbingly deep, brown eyes.
“What is your designation?” the admiral asked.
“Designation? My name is Erica, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“My apologies, the translator is sometimes imprecise. Erica…” he repeated the name, rolling the sounds around in his vocal cavity, “Earth names are fascinating to me. I’ve never heard anything like them. The translator doesn’t seem to recognize it. What does it mean?”
The alien laughed.
“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a family name.”
“I understand,” the Admiral said, although he didn’t, “My guards tell me they have been torturing you for six galactic hours and yet you have refused to tell them anything of importance.”
Once again the prisoner laughed, longer this time. It was a noise the admiral found unsettling, a staccato drumbeat that seemed to emanate more from the creature’s throat than its vocal cavity. It reminded the admiral of an automatic laser pistol firing.
“Is that what they were doing?” the alien chuckled, “I thought it was a massage. Better than the one I got at that spaceport last time I was on leave, anyway.”
The admiral stared at the creature, his eye-stalks twitching with disquiet. He’d heard stories of this species. They were strong, tough, and capable, and on top of that they were clever. They had only recently perfected warp drive and yet within a generation their ships numbered in the thousands. He had known this meeting would be strange, but he hadn’t known what to expect. Certainly not this.
Still, it didn’t matter.
The admiral gestured to the view screen with one tentacle.
“Our fleet outnumbers the earth forces two to one. We will send a subspace communique to your home planet and you will tell them to stand down and allow us to conduct a peaceful occupation.”
Once more the hollow sound of laughter echoed through the control room.
“Why the hell would I do that?” the prisoner asked, “And even if I did, what makes you think they would listen?”
“It is logical,” the admiral replied, nonplussed, “Any resistance would be futile. Our army is significantly larger. You have no hope of winning in a battle. It would be in the interest of both of our people.”
“You don’t know Earth very well, do you? We tend to be... possessive,” the alien said, its vocal cavity curving upward at the edges in a disturbingly predatory manner.
“We know enough. We have been monitoring your military communications and we have access to your interplanetary databases. Our scientists decrypted them a few cycles ago.”
“Then you haven’t had much time to read them.”
“No, but it hardly matters. Your species is intelligent. It has created warp drive and seeded its local system. Only reasonable species are capable of such feats.”
“Oh, really?” the captive asked, “Let me propose something to you, then, in the interest of ‘reason’. Go and access the interplanetary earth history database and do a search for the word ‘Verdun’. V-E-R-D-U-N. Cross reference with the term ‘World War One’. Tell me what you find. I give you my word as an officer, if you still want me to send that communique after you’re done then I’ll do it, no questions asked.”
The admiral chittered with annoyance.
“Very well. If it will ease your cooperation then I will, but I do not see the point. No earth history could change the fact of our numerical advantage.”
“You’ll see.”
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“It’s a lie. A trick. It has to be.”
Captain Erica Falkenhayn of the Earth Federation Exploratory Force smiled at the strange creature that she had deduced was the one in charge. Its eyestalks were twitching wildly in what she assumed was horror.
“No. It’s history. My history. My great, great grandfather planned that battle.”
“No species in the galaxy would do that! No reasonable civilization could commit such horror!”
“We did.” The captain’s smile faded. “And we did it to ourselves. We sent men into a meat grinder of steel and chemicals and explosions. We forced them to live in trenches dug into the earth, filled with mud and sewage, surrounded by the corpses of their comrades. Our ancestors ran headlong into a hurricane of machine gun fire and artillery and poison gas. For eleven months. And neither side surrendered. Almost a million humans died over possession of a single hill in the french countryside. And that was just one battle. Of one war. That’s what humans would rather do to themselves and each other than give up even an inch of territory.”
The alien stared at her disbelievingly.
Captain Falkenhayn shrugged.
“Imagine what we would do to defend our entire planet…”
She leaned in and bared her teeth in a vicious grin.
“...imagine what we’d do to you.”
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“Only the World War I Western Front could have produced the rationale for the Battle of Verdun. In his so-called Christmas Memo of 1915, Erich von Falkenhayn, the chief of the German General Staff, made a uniquely cynical proposal: not to take territory but to take lives, to cause the French army to ‘bleed to death’ defending the fortress complex around Verdun on the Meuse heights.”
-History.com, A&E Television Network-
-https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-i/battle-of-verdun-