It's time for a sad story: the Vorchon Incident.
Finally! You've only mentioned it 600 times.
Gotta build suspense, ya know?
I think you overdid it.
That's the brand, kid.
So, summing up how things started: the Vorchons were a nobody, nowhere species out on the Dor'Tel frontier. Whenever they got too big for their britches, the Dor'Tel would take them down a peg. Didn't wipe them out because the Vorchons were really good at scattering like ants, and exterminating them just wasn't algorithmically justified.
That all changed when the Oolians got embroiled in a war with the Dor'Tel at the same time the Oolians were fighting a couple other brush fires. It's not normally in their nature to arm less advanced species. They actually have some pretty strict norms about that. You can probably imagine they had some bad experiences in the past, like a species' culture changing in profoundly negative ways once they have access to terrifying amounts of military hardware. All that's to say, the Oolians were desperate to divert the Dor'Tel any way they could. They knew about the Vorchons way out where, so they sent a small contingent with a sizable weapons cache. They spent a little time training the Vorchons in how to use it and turned them loose.
Let me step back for a second and describe the Vorchons. They're roughly plant-based. They synthesize metabolic energy from particular EM wavelengths, and this is most efficient when combined with the right mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, and argon in the atmosphere. Get those ratios even slightly out of whack and their photosynthetic processes essentially get choked out.
Physically, they stand about half the height of a typical human, and they pad around on these long, flat "leaves." They have reasonably good sensory organs up top, mostly for processing vibrations. Their entire bodies can "see," as a side effect of their photosynthesis. Their outer membranes are semi-translucent and expose varying shades of blue depending on their health, emotional state, things like that. Dark blue is bad, light blue is good--that's the best way to read their attitudes.
I love color-coded emotions.
Sometimes I wish people had that. Anyway, culturally, these people were peaceful. They didn't like fighting with anyone. They hardly even fought amongst themselves. In fact, they were healthiest when they could congregate in large numbers. Something about how their respiratory waste products acted as modest stimulants and hallucinogens on their sensing organs.
So, wait... these are intelligent plants?
Basically.
Do they have brains?
They don't have a central nervous system. They're more like octopodes. They've got clusters of nerves everywhere which all work in tandem. There's no central location from which everything is directed. They were still highly capable, with significant intelligence, but they learned comparatively slowly. On the other hand, they could share knowledge through direct physical contact with each other, so if you taught one Vorchon a skill they could teach it to everyone around them within minutes. Impressive stuff if you're trying to train an army.
I'll say. Could they even hold rifles?
Not so much. The weapons they were given were mobile artillery platforms with tactile control surfaces, and ship-mounted weapons. It took them a little time to get over the notion of mass murdering Dor'Tel invaders, because even though the Dor'Tel had been kicking them around for centuries, violence was simply not a natural impulse for them. They'd evolved on a planet where they had no significant predators and became the dominant species among a bunch of other similar plant-like lifeforms. They were capable of mild conflict but murder, for instance, was completely alien to them.
Weird to imagine.
They found us no less strange, as you might guess.
Where's the sad part? Did the Dor'Tel nuke them?
Yes, but that's not actually the sad part.
There's something worse than getting nuked?
If all your people don't die at once, absolutely.
So, they put up a good fight against the Dor'Tel, long enough to give the Oolians the edge they needed to make real gains and push back the Dor'Tel threat. Unfortunately for the Vorchons, the Dor'Tel took their meddling very personally--to the extent an omnicidal machine-brain can get "personal"--and vaporized most of their population in a single shot. A few thousand individuals survived. Their planet was rendered uninhabitable. The Oolians scooped them up quickly but their particular biological needs were tough to manage.
The Oolians did a stellar survey and determined that Alpha Centauri Prime was the most compatible planet for the Vorchons. Just one problem: there was already a human colony there.
Uh oh.
Yeah, I think you know where this is going. Your first question might be: why couldn't the humans and Vorchons coexist on the same planet? Well, remember the respiratory waste products I mentioned? They are extremely toxic to humans, even in small quantities. There was no way to ensure that any humans living on the planet would be safe in the long run. A lot of bureaucratic bullshit ensued.
The Oolians put pressure on the Terran Alliance to give up the planet for the Vorchons, and they held back some promised aid as an incentive. Things with the Alliance were still kind of shaky in general, and Earth did not have as tight a grip on the Colonies as one might assume. So, while the order came from Earth, the colonists on AC Prime responded with something only slightly more polite than "piss off."
The Oolians weren't about to make human infighting their problem, so they turned the screws and demanded we sort it out. There was no other planet within a reasonable range that had the characteristics of AC Prime, and that was that. The humans there had to go. I was part of a military convoy sent to assist with the removal.
This is so fucked.
I'm afraid it's only going to get more fucked.
There was no violence during the "evacuation." Lots of bitching and moaning, but the colonists were so laughably outgunned that they could only dream of fighting back under those circumstances.
A couple months later, the Vorchon transports start to arrive. Before the first is able to touch down, it blows up. Within an hour, a group called the Anti-Vorchon Alliance takes credit, saying humanity's interests are being sacrificed to serve the needs of aliens who've never done anything for us. Their leader is a guy named Wang Kovals, who was pretty much a lifelong agitator and found a cause to fire up in all this. The Vorchon settlement proceeded, but the AVA carried out more attacks, mostly sabotage of Vorchon facilities. At this point we were looking at dozens of dead Vorchons--a horrifying number when there's only a few thousand of your kind left.
Then what did Earth do about it?
Not a whole lot they could do. Not in a way that would be immediately satisfactory. They put together a task force, treated it as a criminal matter. The Vorchons had no real ability to sustain themselves without help--there were some nutrients they needed which weren't naturally occurring on AC Prime, which had to be shipped in regularly--and the AVA gladly blew those up whenever they could. The Vorchons started to change. As the months went on, they became understandably bitter and angry. They were always short on their nutritional needs because we couldn't get the shipments in reliably. Usually, a few of their number would be killed when the flaming wreckage came down. They were dying a death by a thousand cuts, and in their eyes both the Oolians and the Alliance had sold them out.
You're probably gathering that none of this sounds bad enough to be "the Vorchon Incident," and you'd be right. Humans are nothing if not self-centered. Occasions where a bunch of aliens die? Who gives a shit?
But if someone takes out a bunch of humans...
Bingo. A handful of Vorchons who were particularly aggrieved went so far as to mass poison one of the other colonies in Alpha Centauri. Killed 800 people, about half the human colonists at the time. The AVA immediately released a statement that they were going to exterminate the Vorchons outright. The Alliance was barely containing riots pretty much everywhere that caught word of this. Now, there was no way the Alliance was going to participate in a genocide of the Vorchons. The Oolians would never, ever forgive something like that. What did happen was, enough heat came down on the AVA that a couple of their guys flipped and gave up Kovals, who got a very speedy trial and a public hanging.
Jesus. That sounds... barbaric? I mean, for your "enlightened future."
Not as enlightened as we would like, I guess. This gave the Vorchons a kick in the pants to get their own radicals under control. The AVA soon disbanded, since without Kovals holding them together, they couldn't really function. But it was clear that Earth simply could not guarantee the safety of the Vorchons on AC Prime, and we had to go hat in hand to the Oolians and beg them to help. They did ultimately find a slightly less good planet out in the middle of nowhere, even outside any claimed space. The Vorchons didn't like the suboptimal conditions but they loved the idea of having absolutely no neighbors to deal with.
Were the responsible Vorchons ever caught?
No, and things were so deteriorated with the Vorchons at the time that we didn't even pursue it. Kovals was the crux of everything. Taking him out closed down the immediate conflict. A lot of people were furious, but it sent a clear message: the Alliance wasn't going to tolerate terrorism toward our alien allies. Did everybody like that? No. Did they fall in line? Yes. Did the Alliance hold hundreds of political prisoners to crush dissent about this? No comment.
After the dust settled, relations between Earth and the Colonies were pretty strained. But it's fair to say that they were always pretty strained, so this didn't make it a lot worse. At the end of the day, the Oolians would back up the Alliance and ensure the Colonies never got too out of hand. The Alliance got lampooned as a bunch of Oolian puppets, which isn't really fair, but that's a free press for you.
The Oolians, for their part, never really forgave that whole debacle. I'm convinced that's why they told us to pound sand when the Koraxians staged their first invasion of Terran space. They sent a token amount of assistance but more or less left us on our own. We won, thank God, but no thanks to the Oolians.
On the other hand, they could have had me executed for the, uh, thing that happened during that war, so I shouldn't sound too grudging toward them.
That's the thing where you helped the Koraxians steal an Oolian cruiser because you thought the Koraxians were rebels but they were actually spies intent on gaining Oolian technology to get an edge in combat?
Uh, yes. That is the very thing. You have a good memory.
It was an insane story. Kind of hard to forget.
They took it better than I expected, being told I'd accidentally handed one of their most powerful ships over to their most hated enemies. By which I mean, I am not allowed in Oolian space anymore, on pain of death.
Do they put that kind of punishment out often?
No.