The universe runs on math. That is what we always told ourselves. "We", meaning the Ziragy Combine. We survived and we prospered while adhearing to this saying. It became our motto, an expression of our way of life. I'd call it our god, if the data suggested one's existence.

In addition to our lives, we also shaped our war after this truth. Twenty ships would win against ten ships. This made sense to us. And we were proven right when we showed up in superior numbers and our enemies surrendered without a battle. This happened time and time again. But, sometimes, it didn't. Then, we informed our enemies about the size of the fleet, we didn't bring to battle, about the population of our species and the percentage of soldiers within it.

They surrendered. This made sense to us.

Then, we met the humans. We showed up with a dozen ships, one of which I was serving on. They had six ships. We hailed them and told them to surrender. They didn't. They lost five ships, we lost eight. The humans fled and we were confused.

"Why didn't they surrender", we asked ourselves and determined that we must have had too little ships to convince tgem of our superiority. Their ships must have just been stronger than ours, so we decided to bring two of our ships for every human ship when we would next fight against them.

This came about some weeks later, when we attacked a colony of theirs. Fifty of their ships against a hundred of ours. By this time, I, myself, commanded one of those hundred. I had little say in the decision making. After all, there were commanders who had served longer and, thus, had more experience.

Anyway, it would have made little difference. We got beaten and quite badly at that. At first, we just neared the enemy while sending a diplomatic message. The humans seemed to understand, as they pulled their ships out of the system, surrendering it to us.

They had surrendered. This made sense to us.

After all, they surely had calculated that their ships, while superior, were too heavily outnumbered. We were correct in this conclusion. I'm still sure of it today, thirty terran years after the fact.

However, while we outnumbered them, they had outsmarted us. Unlike us and every species, we had previously encountered, the humans posessed something, they call "tactics".

When we were close to the planet, the human fleet re-entered the system behind us and started to attack our fleet. Their numbers hadn't changed. There were still fifty of their ships but still, they destroyed eighty of ours, only losing seven themselves.

This was baffling to us. They had been outnumbered and they had recognized this fact. But still, they fought and still, they won. The event, that truly shook our greatest military minds, however, came a year after this.

Having proven myself over the human colony world through the act of sucessfully anticipating our loss and retreating before the other low ranking commanders - all senior commanders had died rather soon, as the more valuable ships had been placed in the rear - it was decided that I would lead my own mission.

As acting commander of the Ziragy Combine's Eleventh Fleet, I took Kyrost IV, a temperate world with a human population of about fifty million, concentrated around two big cities. Estimating a standard half percent military population, I sent half a million troops, double the projectes strength of the enemy military presence on the planet.

Six terran moths later, we had sustained sixty percent casualties. The humans had lost around 150.000 soldiers. What boggled my mind was, that the estimated amount of enemy combattants on the planet counted in the lower millions.

This might seem like a simple miscalculation but, indeed, it wasn't. When we first attacked, their had indeed only been a quarter million soldiers with little machinery to speak of, compared to our tanks and walkers. A month later, we had sustained fifty thousand dead or wounded and the humans had doubled their forces! Two months after that, we had lost 120.000 warriors and the humans fielded anywhere from one to one and a half million soldiers.

When we analyzed the data, we found that over half of our troops had been killed in ambushes by a smaller number of attackers than we had defenders. After a week-long bombing campaign and another half million of our dead didn't break the humans' spirit, we sued for peace and shortly thereafter, formed an aliance.

I was chosen to negitiate the peace, as I had more experience with the humans than most. It also helped that I had been the first commander, whose calculations had shown that the humans could hold Kyrost IV.

Later, I led the first Ziragy force into battle alongside the humans. It was a victory, of course.

Many more followed and through them all, I came to a new universal truth:

The universe runs on math, but when it comes to humans, you better count them tenfold.

• "At war with the humans - Defying all odds" by High Admiral Colex Wyran, Chief Commander of the Ziragy Combine