by Ivan Kal
Tomas thought about it and saw the wisdom in her words, so he nodded. “Very well. I will talk to them.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Year 713 of the Empire — Suvri territory — summit system
The next day, Levisomaerni found herself again in the Empire’s alliance compound, this time accompanied by three other people and a small guard escort. The first was a Lefari, a hexapod with a small blob on the top of his body that held a large mouth and two manipulator arms. He was of a race which, alongside the Partenai, was one of the most prominent in the Josanti League, and Councilor Andar was the only true ally Levisomaerni had in the Great Council of the Josanti League.
The second was a Suvri, a six-legged mechanical walker carrying the bubble filled with water in which President Hijako floated. The Suvri had not been convinced of Levisomaerni’s words, not until the Empire and its allies had arrived. Seeing their ships must’ve confirmed everything that she had told them, and she was sure that their stealth ships had gotten much closer and gotten far better data than anyone else in the system.
The last person was of the race called Jer’Loraru, and the four-armed biped was the first among equals of the Merchant Monarchs of the Afar Group—Gavesh was the one person that had heard and believed Levisomaerni’s warnings without any skepticism, but that was not really unexpected. Gavesh was old, and she had lived through the attacks of the black ships on her people. Few had survived, and most of those refuges had been taken in by the core powers. Gavesh had risen through the Afar Group’s ranks and eventually became the First. Afar Group was not the largest of the core powers by any stretch; their territory lay toward the rim on the opposite side of the Empire. But while they were not the largest, they were by far the wealthiest, and their Merchant Fleet outnumbered most other core powers’ Fleets. Though the Merchant Fleet wasn’t technically a fighting fleet, they did have weapons. But even discounting the Merchant Fleet, they had in their service a large number of mercenary fleets from all over the core and even beyond.
If she had to rank the Afar Group among the core powers, Levisomaerni would put them in the top three alongside the Josanti League and the Tar’ferat.
The three of them reached their destination and the Empire’s guards allowed them and their escorts inside. A Nel on the Emperor’s staff led them inside to the same parlor she and Tomas had used yesterday and they entered into a room with the representatives of the Empire and its allies already there.
Levisomaerni walked forward and hadn’t made more than five steps inside when she heard a gasp from behind her, and one of the people inside the room shot to his feet immediately with waves of shock and surprise coming off of him. Levisomaerni frowned as she realized that the person looked suspiciously familiar and she turned around to see much the same reaction on the face of Gavesh.
She was about to ask what this was about when Tomas spoke.
“Well, I did not expect this.”
Levisomaerni looked at the two speechless people, who she could now see were clearly of the same race. “Does someone mind filling the rest of us in?”
The person on the Empire’s side was the first to speak, his eyes still wide. “We thought that we were the only ones, the only ones that survived.”
And as soon as he said it, Levisomaerni realized what had happened. Some of the people of the Union must’ve escaped the onslaught of the black ships and made their way far away to the other side of the galaxy, thinking that the rest of their people had died. It probably would’ve happened, had the black ships continued their assaults. But as she now knew, their programming didn’t allow them to wipe out entire civilizations, but rather destroy only enough to keep the buffer between the Enlightened and the galaxy consistent. The remnants of the collapsed Unions had survived and fled in the aftermath.
Gavesh narrowed her eyes on the other of her kind. “I know you…” she whispered, and then her eyes widened. “You are Vorash, brother to Senator Garash.”
Vorash didn’t have a chance to respond before Tomas stepped in. “I know that this is a surprising development for both of you, but we are here to speak of other matters. Matters that are connected in the reasons why your Union fell. I am sure that there will be time for the two of you to speak privately.”
“Ah, yes… Of course, Tomas,” Vorash said, taking a seat.
“Please be seated”—Tomas gestured for Levisomaerni and her party to take a seat—“and we can begin.”
Levisomaerni took a seat across from Tomas and his allies, with her companions taking the seats next to her, and Hijako parking his mech close to them.
“Allow me to make the introductions,” Tomas said, and started introducing the people on his side. “You’ve all already met Viceroy Vorash of the Erasi. Next to him are the Kar Daim of the Shara Daim, Kane and Vaana.” The twins nodded their heads. “And on my other side”—Tomas gestured to his right—“is the Old Scar, envoy of the Krashinar, trusted of the Six. I am Emperor Tomas Klein.”
Levisomaerni’s eyes turned to the large alien. She had heard of the Krashinar, but she hadn’t taken much interest before yesterday. But after seeing their fleet arrive with Tomas, she had cursed herself for not digging in further. They were a race so far away from the core of the galaxy that she had allowed her prejudice to judge them prematurely. Then, after she had seen their truly strange ships, she had asked Tomas for any information he was willing to pass on to her.
She was very intrigued. She had never encountered a race quite like them, from their ships to the way the Sha felt around this Old Scar. They were impressive, and even more so after Tomas had informed her that the Krashinar had never been helped along the way by the People, like all other races were. Their territory alone was massive, larger than any of the core powers. She didn’t know much about their fleet strength, as Tomas hadn’t sent her anything truly important, but she was certain that Tomas wouldn’t have brought them if he thought that they couldn’t hold their own.
Levisomaerni turned to her companions and introduced them as well. “This is President Hijako of the Suvri.” She started with the mech holding the Suvri and then moved down, gesturing to her other side. “This is Councilor Andar, and the First among the Merchant Monarchs, Gavesh.”
“It is a pleasure to meet with you,” Tomas said to them and then turned to look at Levisomaerni. “If you please.”
Levisomaerni cleared her throat as Tomas let her take the lead for the meeting.
“You are here,” she spoke to her companions, “because you are the only ones who I believe for certain will listen to what Tomas and I have to say. I know that you have heard a lot of rumors and that some of what I have told you sounds far-fetched—but Tomas and I will present proof to at the summit, and we will make it available to you as well before the gathering.”
“The rumors,” Andar started, “range from you being a puppet for a warmongering rim Empire to you losing your mind.”
Levisomaerni twitched at that, but didn’t lash out. “The truth is much simpler, I’m afraid. There’ve been moments when I wished I had lost my mind; it would’ve been easier than trying to get people to believe me only for them to ignore me.”
“You told me that you have proof that the black ships are in fact a containment designed to keep something in,” Gavesh said.
“That is correct,” Tomas interjected. “The black ships are a containment designed by a person named Ullax Darr. She was one of the People, the first race to become intelligent in this galaxy. The People had lived for a long time, and in that time they had spread wide and discovered much. Eventually, when they grew lonely being the only intelligent race in the galaxy, they decided to uplift other races to join them.”
“That seems like a tall tale,” Hijako said.
“It is true,” Levisomaerni said, steeling herself to speak about a secret her people had held for a long time. “My people, the Partenai, had been one of the races that they first uplifted.”
That revelation had profound ef
fect on her three companions.
“What?” Andar asked. “That isn’t possible! The Lefari were there when the Partenai left their homeworld. We found you only a few decades after you started exploring the stars.”
Levisomaerni shifted uncomfortably. “That is what we told you, yes. It wasn’t the truth.”
“We have seen your level of technology. You couldn’t have deceived us.”
“What you saw was real. When our two races met, it had not been the first time that we have traveled the stars.”
Hijako swam in his bubble and faced Levisomaerni. “Explain.”
Leivsomaerni took a deep breath. “We had been uplifted by the People, but we didn’t value their gift. We grew envious of the technology that they had kept from us, and we conspired with a few other races that they had uplifted alongside us to take what they kept from us. We declared war on them, and they punished us for it by throwing us back to our home worlds, taking their gifts and leaving us to find our own way back to the stars.”
She shook her head as she remembered. She hadn’t been alive when that had happened, but she had been born close enough to the time of their punishment, close enough to remember the struggle as her people went from traveling the stars to trying to make fire and shelters. It had been a painful period in their history.
“We were a broken people,” she continued. “We had used their technology, but had never really understood it. When they took it from us, we didn’t know anything about how to replicate even the simplest of their technology. It took us a long time to realize the errors of our ways, to learn on our own and find our own way to the stars. We did so in the hope of finding the People again and asking for forgiveness.”
Andar’s legs shifted as he turned toward her. The Lefari didn’t have eyes, but all of his receptor hairs were turned on her. “That actually explains a few things. You’ve always had a powerful fleet, but you seldom actually went to war. We’ve always wondered why you insisted on negotiating, even past the point where most would give up.”
Levisomaerni bowed her head in shame. “We were attempting to atone for actions of the past. We had made a promise to never again go to war without great cause.”
“This is all very fascinating, and I do want to learn more,” Gavesh said, “but this does not explain why you are here with an empire from the rim, and why you want to gather galactic powers.”
Levisomaerni looked to Tomas, and he stood up.
“The reason why we are involved is because we were created for this purpose,” Tomas said, and Levisomaerni could see the confusion from her companions.
“We, as in my race, the humans, alongside the Nel and Shara Daim,” Tomas said with a nod toward the twins, “were created by one of the last living beings of the People, Axull Darr. He engineered us by using his own genetics and that of the life on one of the worlds he found, and he left us to develop on our own. It was his hope that we could fix the mistake that they had made.”
“A mistake?” Hijako asked.
Tomas nodded. “They are called the Enlightened, and they are the reason why the black ships exist and why they do what they do,” he said.
“What are these Enlightened?” Andar asked.
Tomas took a large breath and started speaking. “The People were a great race, and for a long time they had traveled across the galaxy…until they started dying. No one knew why this happened to them or how to cure them. And so the People died off, until only a handful of them remained. Those that remained had not given up hope, and they were still attempting to find a cure—then three of them, who were working on creating a form of life from scratch that was supposed to cure them, did something.
“It is unclear exactly what happened, but that new life-form infected them, changed them. They became something else. Their transformation cured them, but also made them incredibly powerful. They also came to believe that they needed to wipe out all life in the galaxy—and so they set out to do exactly that. They used their new power to create life-forms to serve them, races created only for destruction, which procreated by feeding off other life.
“But the other surviving of the People came up with a plan. They created an AI and they gave it access to massive factories in order to build up enough force to match the Enlightened. The AI was bound and programmed with a single purpose: to contain the Enlightened until it could find a solution that would end the threat they pose.”
Gavesh looked at Tomas with wide horror-filled eyes. “They put an AI in charge? It went rogue, didn’t it? That is why my people died!”
Tomas shook his head. “Sadly, no. The AI had acted as it was programmed. They programmed it to deny the Enlightened the capability to grow their armies. Its programming is to clear away any life in a set area so as to maintain a buffer between the Enlightened and the rest of the galaxy. It had been deemed a necessary sacrifice to protect the rest of the galaxy.”
“What?!” Gavesh yelled out.
“The black ships surround the Enlightened completely, and every time that the Enlightened try to push through, the AI moves the containment to compensate for the systems it loses.”
“That…is insane,” Gavesh whispered.
“It is despicable,” Andar added.
“It is what they deemed necessary to protect the most people,” Tomas said. “I might not agree with what they had done, but it is in the past. If they hadn’t done as they had, there probably wouldn’t be anything living left in the galaxy.”
“And what is this really about? You want us to fight against something so powerful that they had to create the black ships to contain it? No one had ever won against the black ships, and you want us to fight both them and something even more dangerous?”
Tomas shook his head. “The Enlightened are the true threat; the black ships are just following orders of the AI. Our hope is that we can deal with the AI once we find its control system. Axull Darr, the being that was our ancestor, did not agree with his people. He left and had no part in what they had done. Instead, he created us. He believed that a united galaxy would stand a chance against the Enlightened.”
Gavesh looked at him skeptically. “If what you say is true, the last push these Enlightened made was when the black ships attacked my people.”
“That is correct, and we have intel that suggest that they are preparing for something again. And even if they don’t, it is our belief that the containment isn’t really keeping them against their will. It was Axull Darr’s belief that they had let the containment keep them isolated on purpose; and if that is true, that means that they have had thousands upon thousands of years to further their plans. We know little of their ultimate goals, but we know that they are patient, and the galaxy cannot afford to let them remain as they are, not without knowing what they are doing.”
“I do not think that many will believe you, or even want to act,” Andar said.
“There are more intelligent beings in the galaxy now than there ever have been. Now is the time when we have a chance. Even if they don’t believe us about the Enlightened, they know the threat of the black ships. If we get them on board to deal with them, it will be easy enough to prove to them the existence of the Enlightened.”
“I agree with Tomas,” Levisomaerni said. “Now is the time for the galaxy to unite. Too many have been terrorized by the black ships, and the danger of the Enlightened must be ended, no matter what others think the truth is.”
Levisomaerni looked at her companions, and she could see that her and Tomas’s words had had an effect—now she only needed them to go and convince their allies as well.
Perhaps they would pull this off.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Year 713 of the Empire — Suvri territory — summit system
Tomas sat in the seat assigned to him, with his allies having places next to him. They were down on the floor, just in front of the podium, in the center of the round room. Around them were two hundred and twelve representatives of races and star-nations across t
he galaxy.
It was a staggering number. Tomas wasn’t even sure where most of these races were from, and in truth most of them weren’t really up to par with the core powers or the Rimward Alliance, as the Empire and its allies had become known among those gathered here; but still, they needed them.
There were a lot of different kinds of aliens here. A part of the arena was actually a series of pools with only the heads of different aliens peeking out, whereas another was encased in a translucent glass-like material and filled with different atmosphere. There were several smaller aquariums, each with a different color of water, and even a few long poles on which there were perched avian races. It was all quite impressive.
A speaker on the podium called for silence, and the arena quieted. Levisomaerni flew off from her spot next to him and made a slow circle around the room before finally landing gracefully on the podium and approaching the center. Once in the center, she made a slow turn, looking around at the arena, before she finally started speaking.
“I greet you all, and give my gratitude for accepting my invitation.” Levisomaerni paused, flexing her wings. “Today, we have all made the galaxy a smaller place. This gathering, the first of its kind, brings together races and nations from every corner of the galaxy. After today, many of you will leave with new friends, new opportunities, new trade agreements that will benefit your peoples. After today, the galaxy will be a better place.”