A vessel from Earth drops out of sub-light speed, a million miles away from an ongoing battle. The vessel, a thin white tube of aerogels and graphene wrapped in ceramics, looks delicate, but that is to put it lightly. It comes to a stop and bobs dangerously inside a gravitational anomaly.

"Fuckers are using gravitational weapons on each other. Need to find a safe eddy to set up operations," says the ensign on control, a brash fellow freshly graduated from the academy.

"Engage." the man sitting in the captain's chair intones as if bored.

The navigator finds an eddy and plots a course. And the control works his magic. In route the science officer chimes in, "Captain, getting a system read out now, 500 vessels engaged. Detecting north of 500,000 inert bios. Gravitational weapons, subatomic explosions, and plasma sparks are taking out as many friendlies as they are enemies."

"They must really hate each other. Which war is this again?" the captain sits with his chin in left-hand, elbow on its armrest. He scowls as his question goes unanswered. Humanity numbers wars and this one was categorized with a barcode. The slang term for any war is a thrift shop but no one volunteers that information or bothered to memorize the twelve-digit code associated with the here and why of the death on the bridge-viewer. This thrift shop is bits of color and the occasional quantum explosion. It is not a coincidence they are here to witness this, for this is humanity's bread and butter. Most of human space-faring existence has been spent sniffing around graveyards like this one. Vast regions of space in which the fall out of interspecies warfare exists well beyond peace, or annihilation, and will likely until the heat death of the Universe and then maybe even beyond that.

"Any change? Have they seen us?"

"I don't know captain. This is a bad one. They might be too distracted. But I can't tell."

"Captain to dramatics."

"Dramatics here." The face of the director appears on the bridge-viewer. He is a frail man with many health problems. Yellow skin, black bags fully encircling his beady blue eyes. He is certainly not fit for space service, under any other circumstances, save for being the Terran solar system's imminent combat materialist.

"Mister Director, how close are we to getting started?"

The director turns a critical eye over a data pad, then a finger down the information there, and reports, "Aye, captain, putting the finishing touches on today's theatrics now. Can probably raise curtain whenever you want to call action."

The Captain nods, "Action, Mister Director, and give them hell."

The director smiles a crooked yellow tooth smile and the viewer goes back to the battle. Immediately there is a huge explosion, right in the middle of all the action. The flash is accompanied by a gamma particle wave. It's an illusion like being in a wave pool back on Earth. The gamma wave can only nudge, but when the director lets loose five more explosions of light and gamma waves, one right after the other, he gets every single living thing's attention.

Communication confirms, "we got them now sir."

"Good. Mister Director, when you are ready for the second act, on your mark."

There is no reply only the sudden appearance of a planet-sized being sparkling with green lightning. The gamma wave roll of the illusion rocks both sides of the conflict. One of the reported effects is massive amounts of motion sickness. Like shaking a soda bottle, a few ships pop in huge explosions. A few others shut down, with all electronics and non-life systems fried. The Gamma waves of the massive illusion can isolate a target over and over but what it looks like to those observing is that the ship exploding has been eaten.

The chaos, the theatrics cause, is immediate. Some of the warring vessels turn and run leaving a few behind to fire on the monster before them, but being a thing of light the weapon-fodder sails right through. This is actually the dangerous part for the humans. Where at any time a fear-induced accident can occur.

But nothing going, the execution of the production, this time is flawless.

"Excellent work Mister Director. Conduct act three and begin the clean up."

The captain acts stoic but inside he is smug. It is all too easy, this deception. Like no other species knows how to detect a performance so for that silly reason alone this keeps working. Some of the slaves have suggested the ability to lie is unique only to humans, that, everywhere else, honesty is considered the gold standard for a species' survival.

An alarm sounds announcing the beginning of act three. This was everyone's favorite part. All hands type action. The illusion extends to a fleet of salvage vessels that fly into the graveyard and begin chopping up the alien tech. The human vessels look like moon-sized versions of the planet-sized monster that curls into a ball and begins snoring green gamma lightening as its children eat what's left. But in reality, survivors are enslaved and auctions are set up with allies across the galaxy for the interesting bits. And most importantly those that escape take with them a fear that they don't fully understand, a fear for a new Apex predator, most call The Ship Devourers from Terra Prime.