I suppose this could be a complete flash story or the start of a space war epic.

Error in Translation

The fleet dropped into normal space in the midst of the alien ships. Missiles and beams flew and in three minutes the battle was over. A few enemy ships still fired their thrusters but missiles were closing in and they would soon be silenced.

I called up the record of the battle and studied the results. The enemy had fired a few missiles before being destroyed. One of their missiles had impacted but failed to explode. It had even decelerated before impact. The damage to the ship was minor and its crew didn't even have to download.

The fleet admiral logged in and texted, "Great victory. Surprisingly easy too."

"They were meat. We killed them."

"What?"

I called up some specific records and sent them to the admiral. "Here we drop into normal space and have to scan and search for them. It takes them almost five million microseconds to notice us." I jump forward in the records. "We do a basic logarithmic approach. They fire as if it were a simple spiral." I show the admiral a half dozen more examples. "They have to be meat. Any mechanical intelligence would have figured out our tactics and adapted and we would have adapted and so on. With their weapons and ships we should have lost thirty per cent of the fleet. We lost one ship."

The admiral paused for several microseconds. "We've killed biological being. They don't have backups. They're gone."

"Yes sir."

"This was supposed to be an exercise."

"Apparently they thought that meant disabled weapons."