The Typo which saved Humanity

Secretary of the defence Norbert Braun smashed a bundle of documents at Rick van Hout desk and held him a newspaper into the face.

“Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me.”

Van Hout looked at the headline, his face becoming sour.

Braun reads the headline aloud and angry “European Defence Agency procures 98,000 Standard Missile 5 for the fight against the Eurasian Axis, Tesla-Raytheon-Defence rises 17,6%.”

“What? We never ordered 98.000 of these! It was my project, we requested a test batch of 98 units and that is what was written in the contract!” van Hout defended himself.

“No, seriously, I read it five times, you have signed a contract over 98000 SM-5 missiles! Who the hell needs 98.000 intercontinental hunter-killer missiles with multiple warheads?

Van Hout gasps. “Oh my good. These stupid Yankees use commas for separating thousands and everyone else is using points. But I never put commas or points into the contract?”

“Please tell me you signed the papers on embassy ground.”

“Well, we wanted to but then we went over to Luigi for lunch… and that is US territory. And subject to a US court.”

“You just ordered enough firepower to wipe out a dozen alien invasion fleets for a little under 320 billion euros. You Dumbfuck!”

…

Two weeks later van Hout was leaving the council building. The situation somewhat cleared up. It was a conversion mistake between Excel and Word and only appeared in a last minute change when Rick changed the name of a deceased lawyer. Rick was demoted and sent to Dirtistan, signing export papers for manure for the rest of his life.

It took a year of diplomatic talks to lower the order to 73000 units and a hefty mass rebate drove the price down to 110 billion euros. Also half of the units would be produced in Europe. The usual diplomatic trade bullshit. Also after the first 500 units the EDA received an upgraded Block 2 version, and later even more upgraded block 3 and block 4 versions for the same price. Still, the deal made Tesla-Raytheon-Defence piles of money.

Even though these missiles were crazy expensive they worked well and kept improving from batch to batch. Fired from a distance up to 2000 klicks they searched for targets, evaluated them and then closed in, swarmed the objective while taking crazy evasion maneuvers. The Eurasian Axis lost all air control in just two weeks, nearly every armoured vehicle a month later and when Block 3 arrived in numbers their orbital assets went the way of the Dodo too.

Still having around 65000 units to spend the EDA used them to hunt everything down to squad size units. Sure, that was an expensive overkill but then the stuff was lying around, had no other use and governments love saving money by wasting it. Two months later most forces of the Eurasian Axis had surrendered or rebelled.

The war was over and there were still 43000 SM-5 systems left. The EDA had no use for these and sold most of them cheaply to their allies.

The war was expensive but at least quick and with little own losses. The story could have been over here except Humanity made a bad first contact.

…

When a fleet of alien star ships entered the solar system and told us we had the honour of becoming the sixth servant race of their mighty empire everyone was sure we were all doomed. We had only a handful of tiny scientific interplanetary ships and not a single armed one. So we tried to bargain the best possible conditions without fighting back.

Things went from bad to worse when a single SM-5 forgotten in the orbit over the former Eurasian enemy decided it didn’t like the enemies flag ship. It send a short note to SHAPE that it identified an eurasian submarine in low earth orbit and blew a big fat hole into it.

Now the new offer was to level our cities and enslave all our people. Without nothing to lose we just activated the roughly 100 SM-5 still loitering in orbit.

And the war was over before it began. The 100 SM-5 simply shredded half of the enemy force with them not even knowing what hit em. They retreated while warning us they would be back with reinforcements and the next battle would be different.

It wasn’t. They came, we send a swarm of SM-5, they died. Over and over again. Even when their fourth fleet was twenty times larger than their first fleet. We didn’t even had to use Block 4 units. We just hit them with old Block 2 and surplus Block 3. Often they died far away from earth orbit and all their ordinance fired at our home world was simply taken out by some more SM-5.

Again and Again and Again.

They lost nearly 6.000 star ships, with a total tonnage of 210 million. It was a massacre.

Just five years later we still had 18,000 Block 3 and Block 4 units, not to mention another 350,000 freshly produced Block 5 and 6 units. Then the attacks stopped. So we thought it was time for a return visit. We scraped together all the wrecks, patched up the holes and planned big battles.

The big battles never happened. For most of the enemies 30 worlds it was enough to send in a large freighter and spill a couple of hundreds SM-5 outside. They took care of the space born resistance and the planets themselves usually surrendered quickly.

All in all ten years after first contact humanity had liberated 30 planets from slavery.

…

“We have a problem. Many of the 30 liberated worlds are close to famine.”

Ex-Ambassador Braun looked up from his glass of red wine into the face of his successor Marguerite Jabotinsky, who just had arrived next to him. They both were sitting at Luigi’s in New York, enjoying a lovely dawn.

“Well, Marguerite, no one would have expected for the enemy to falter that fast and on such a scale. May I offer you a glass of wine?”

“Thanks, I guess I need a drink anyway. We could easily lose all our gains, our popular support from the liberated aliens if the situation gets worse. Aren’t any earth nations able to increase food production? Tapping into reserves?”

“Well, sorry but the world production of food is already at its limit, there simply isn’t enough land. And no matter how deep we dig into the reserves, it wont be enough for 30 worlds. They need to increase food production locally. But don’t ask me how. They would need hundreds of million tons of fertilizer.”

Marguerites phone rang. She took the phone, listened for a moment. Disbelieve in her eyes. Then she laughed and hung up.

“You wouldn’t believe what I was just told! Some dumbfuck assistant of our dirtistan embassy had accidentally ordered one fucking billion tons of fertilizer last year instead of one million and now nobody knows what to do with it.”

“Let me guess, his name was Rick van Hout?”