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To the long lived and slow moving races of the Galactic Federation, one thousand years was the flash of a match. The Council had ruled the Federation for over one million years, a period referred to as the Consular Age. The Federation had experienced a dozen such ages, each as long, or longer, in its expansive history.

To humanity, with its short life spans and unparalleled drive for expansion, one thousand years might as well be an eternity. Empowered by faster than light travel alone, humanity could reproduce logarithmically within that time frame. However, it would take ultra-luminal speeds, and the quick and widespread exposure to resource heavy systems, to truly unleash the viral growth potential in humanity’s DNA, and achieve exponential growth.

A single group of 160 fertile human beings, spread far and wide through the galaxy by Loloth engines, free from resource constraints, could independently create billions of new human beings – soldiers, pilots, ship builders, engineers – in a little over 300 years. The Federation Council had relied on this same math once before.

The “Glory of Loll” fixed its gravity well generators using recycled raw materials from humanity. Riding a wave of space-time itself, never accelerating at all, the entire Human war fleet – millions of humans on thousands of nuclear armed and powered ships – arrived, within six months, at the galactic core. They stopped a few A.U.s from the single habitable planet in the bright, multi-stellar central system of the Federation: System “1”, Planet “1”.

The Commander of the “Glory of Loll” made an announcement, sharing the full data dump on the Battle of Broken Pride nearly two years earlier – the impossible destructive force of the new invaders – and the loss of the entire Federation Fleet. For three months, at the Commander’s insistence, the Human’s remained on their aggressively angular, missile studded ships, as news of the fiasco spread throughout the Federation, along with reports from the Galactic rim of star systems falling, one by one, to an unbeatable, nuclear horde.

Eventually a message was sent to the humans. The council would not allow humanity to land on 1. However, they agreed with the plan of Commander KyuTanLol, and they would assist in the advancement of that plan.

Loloth ships were called into System 1, each taking on board a contingent of one thousand human beings. At ultra-luminal speeds, the ships would ferry humans to virgin worlds – planet’s previously quarantined to protect incipient life, or set aside as natural parks, or planets on the outskirts of the territory of established races.

Humanity was systematically seeded across one entire side of the galaxy, their genes tailored as required to survive a particular planet’s biodiversity or eco system, but always leaving their core traits untouched – their ingenuity, aggression, lifespan, and alwayy their rate of reproduction.

In this way, in just over two centuries, most planets habitable to carbon based, complex life forms bore human settlers. In a sense, these worlds were inoculated with the Human Virus. That being done, it was time to build an army – which meant allowing human beings to do the one thing more frightening than starting a war – reproduce.

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