by Aer-ki Jyr
September 21, 154965
Solar System (Home One Kingdom)
Earth
Davis received word that his special package had arrived in Atlantis, but he didn’t request it sent to his office. Big as it was, his tower wasn’t designed to hold the larger races in Star Force. In fact, it was very much built for Human or Zen’zat size, and so was most of Atlantis with a few areas that could accommodate larger races.
That might have seemed odd to outsiders who would wonder why the capitol city could only house some of Star Force’s races, but Davis knew better that size mattered and trying to put the smaller races into a confined space with the larger ones did not work well. Axius, which did this far more often than the rest of the Empire, still had two versions of itself. A small and large version, with Human-sized races being the boundary line between the two types of Axius cities…but in practice there were four. ‘Uppers’ and ‘Lowers’ is what they were referred to, and the denizens split up voluntarily in most cases to the match their sizes.
Humans could live in the Large Uppers along with Oso’lon, but those cities were designed for the massive sizes of that kind of race and had huge steps, long walks between buildings, and were far more spread out than many Humans preferred. Some still did choose to live there, but most didn’t, and the smallest of races like the Irondel were forbidden to live in the Large division.
Likewise Oso’lon were forbidden from living in the Small division due to the danger involved in stepping on the tiniest ones and accidentally killing them. The same was true of the Element Zones within Axius cities, where heat, air composition, and pressure were all variable, but not for an entire planet. Usually it was parts of big cities or an entirety of a small one.
Then you had Zones. Land was the base zone, with Air and Water being the other most common ones. Axius cities, when they encompassed large worlds, liked to have all three major Zones connected so denizens could interact along the boundaries, but while Land had a Large/Small division, Air had 4 of them ranging from Tiny to Massive, while Water had none. It seemed in the water the larger races simply had right of way to move where they wanted and the smaller ones swam around them, and since very few actually touched bottom, there wasn’t a risk of smashing each other in most cases.
Axius was a symbol of the complexity within Star Force’s social interdynamic, though most of the Empire was segregated through practicality. Sometimes there were pairings of races on planets that worked well together, and the V’kit’no’sat and Zen’zat were legendary for this, but in most cases every world was designed for one race plus Humans, for they were the glue that held everything together, particularly the Archons, and to a lesser extent Mavericks, though Mavericks tended to stay with their own races when missions allowed.
And there was a lot to do. The number of Bsidd worlds alone boggled the mind. They had expanded so far and increased in population so much that they were an empire within an empire, and Bsidd Mavericks could spend their entire lives inside that inner Empire with plenty to do, and the same was true of many others, but one would think that the Capitol of Star Force would have embraced the diversity within the Empire in its design…but no. That wasn’t the case at all.
Atlantis was designed now as it was in the beginning. It was the heart of Star Force, not a representation of it, and if your body functioned the way the masses assumed, your blood pumping organ would be made up of tissues from across your body ‘representing’ the whole…and in being constructed as such, fail to accomplish anything other than being a symbol. Your body would die from lack of blood flow as the pump wouldn’t function, and the same was true of Star Force.
Atlantis was the pump for the command structure, and while it was not necessary for the survival of Star Force due to the redundancy built into the Empire, it was necessary for a higher level of efficiency. And above that, it was Davis’s home. And one designed their home the way they liked, not by popular demand. And to be honest, nothing in Star Force happened by popular demand, something that Old Earth would have found very offensive in its legendary stupidity. Yet it was that stupidity that had birthed Davis and the trailblazers, giving them a plethora of problems and challenges to overcome before they even got to other worlds.
As such Davis’s panoramic office was designed for the medium races, and could accommodate the smaller ones, but not the larger. If he wanted to meet with an Era’tran, he had to go elsewhere in Atlantis, though in most cases he would just use holo communication. But in the case of avians he had another option built in.
With a thought command Davis had part of his office roof retracting down into a set of stairs that he walked upwards on, coming to the roof of his office that transformed into a deck with railing that normally wasn’t there. Upon it he waited briefly, then his ‘special package’ flew up in front of him, blotting out the sun momentarily, before landing on the far side railing after testing for its strength.
The dragon sat back on its rear legs with its front two in between them and all four on the railing wall as if it was a bird, drawing a raised eyebrow from Davis, for he hadn’t expected that much agility from him, for he knew the Les’i’kron didn’t possess as much.
“Greetings Director Davis,” Pol’ake said in English as his wings tucked up alongside his body and nearly disappeared into his gray scales. “I am honored by the meeting.”
“Why are you here?” Davis asked bluntly.
“You summoned me, I was told,” he said, confused.
“I mean why didn’t you leave with the others? The full reason, not just what you told my people. My telepathic skills aren’t small, but they are compared to the others you’ve met. That said, I have an innate sense about people, and you are duplicitous. No one else is monitoring us. There are audio dampening screens around this platform with visual haze generators. They can see us but they can’t see our mouths moving or other detail. It’s just you and me, Dragon. And if you want a future with us, it’s on the condition that you are as equally blunt with me as I am with you.”
“Dragon? You refer to your ancient stories. How odd.”
“Why are you here?” Davis reiterated.
Pol’ake slumped ever so slightly. “I am here because I have nowhere else to go.”
“Explain that.”
“The Zak’de’ron civilization has been nearly destroyed three times. You know of the more recent two, but long before any of us now living we were attacked and reduced to a scattering of planets. We do not even know the name of our attackers. They were not Hadarak. And we do not know why they attacked us. But they stopped before all of us were destroyed, and the few planets remaining lived in fear thereafter. Eventually they reconnected to each other, not having known anyone else had survived, and it was believed our enemy either thought us dead, or effectively so and didn’t bother to sweep away the remaining scraps. Far into the future when we formed the V’kit’no’sat to fight the Hadarak, our reasons were more selfish, for we also wished to have protection if this unnamed enemy ever returned to finish what it started.”
“Then the V’kit’no’sat betrayed us, and killed all save for Zeno’dor and the nest of eggs he protected. That should not have been possible. They should not have found all our other refuges, but they did, and we still don’t know how, for the V’kit’no’sat did not know how. Many were later taken and had their minds raided past the point of death to find the secrets they would not willingly give up, but no answers to how we were so effectively betrayed were ever discovered. By chance do you know how they did what they did?”
“I was told they captured some of you and dissected your brains to get the answers they wanted. Beyond that, I don’t know.”
“They could not have gotten enough from them, for most of our secrets were not shared with the same people. Regardless, now we had been all but destroyed twice, both with an element of mystery that prevented us from analyzing and eliminating the weakness that nearly doomed us. Then by nothing less than the universe spitting in
our face, one of our own returns in the service of another galaxy and attacks the V’kit’no’sat, kills their leadership, and dies before we even know of the assault. We pay the price for something we did not do, and we fight a third war with a more or less even split, but the attrition done is nearly as lethal. Our leadership broke during that third war, in ways I cannot fully explain. And from them a sickness spread to the others. We harbor more of a hive mind than we like to admit, and I had to pretend compliance with the sickness else I would have been killed as others were.”
Davis frowned. “An internal purge?”
“A small one, but then again word of it was not well known, and it could have been far larger on other worlds, but on mine there were 3 I knew of personally that simply disappeared, and when I inquired I was told not to. We are unaccustomed to being told to turn a blind eye against anything. That is something we instruct servants to do, not peers, and I sensed danger in the order, so I played along, searching for what answers I could without asking others directly. I eventually came across this…”
A hologram emerged over Davis’s head, for the platform wasn’t large enough to display it between them as Pol’ake’s neck covered most of it, but the Director didn’t have to crane his neck up much to see the flat image of what looked like a child’s scrawling.
“Where is that from?”
“Ancient art stored in a vault from before the first Fall. It was remnants of worlds that were completely purged, for no world that was attacked survived to tell the tales. All we ever saw where their ships, and few who did escaped to report it. Comms were jammed before landing forces or orbital bombardment began, so we did not even know who was killing us. But I believe this art, recovered from a hatchery whose armored walls were thickest of all to protect those most vulnerable, depicts the attackers.”
Davis stared at the shadow-like silhouette scrawled in what could be charcoal on a synthetic panel. It looked Human, with two arms, two legs, a head, and an upright posture unlike an Era’tran or Rit’ko’sor. But behind this blurry drawing were sticks. Sticks growing up behind it like two trees with no leaves, and coming from behind each shoulder. And out of those sticks were jagged lines of bright yellow, depicting some form of lightning that struck and killed other drawings of what were obviously dragons.
“Do you see it, Director?” Pol’ake asked when he didn’t respond.
“I see it.”
“My race’s leadership is broken, and they are now forcing the rest to turn off their minds, destroy what pride they have left, and submit themselves to our former conquerors in some twisted sense of protection or a desire to gain the strength we lacked. It is madness, and those of us who did not likewise become poisoned with it were eliminated. My race has become a willing thrall to our past murderers.”
“Are there any records of the Temples in your history? Or contact with the machines that built them?”
“None.”
“Do the ships mentioned match the Neofan warships?”
“No, I have nothing that obvious, but given it was so long ago they may have changed their design. This drawing is enough to convince me, so I ask you now, bluntly, why would the Neofan try to destroy us then only to take us now into their Bond of Resistance? Assuming it isn’t a ploy to quietly finish what they started long ago.”
“I can only speculate on what they’ve told me, and I do know what is true and what is not, for they are liars as far as my sense of them goes. They have negotiated fairly and honestly with me thus far, but I do trust them or what they tell me in full, but they have stated that to operate independently of their race is a fate worse than death, and it makes them turn mad. That is why House Atriark had to get permission to set up in this galaxy. Had they not, they would have become outcast. So if the Neofan did attack the Zak’de’ron long ago, it was either sanctioned or by the insane, and the insane are hunted by the Neofan, so they scatter to the wind.”
“Most likely sanctioned then.”
“Did you know of the Hadarak at that time?”
“We have always known of them. They let most of the galaxy know of their presence through random attacks. We did not challenge them then. We did not have the strength.”
“What did your race do back then?”
“I know little more than myths, but one stated that we were not born of the air, but of the water. And in the water we were the anti-predator, maintaining dominance and allowing the oceans to fill with life. But that such life attracted even larger predators from the wilds, and we were engaged in a never-ending war that we could not stomach the incompleteness of, so we grew wings and lungs and took to the skies where we could be free and do what we liked without the burden of the water upon us.”
“Do you have dormant aquatic genetics?”
“No. None at all. I do not believe that portion of the myth. It is the anti-predator part that I am curious about. Does it mean anything to you?”
“A predator does what it does out of instinct, mostly, and that instinct is encoded in it by the universe itself. It is darkside coding meant to ensure it lives at all costs. An anti-predator isn’t a predator that preys on other predators. It is something stronger that stops the predators and thus stops the predation, defying the darkside coding. An anti-predator is one facet of the lightside.”
Pol’ake drew in a quick, deep breath.
“Is that significant?” Davis asked.
“Kara has told me much of the lightside, but never that. How do predators treat anti-predators?”
“They kill us whenever they can, often grouping up to do so.”
Pol’ake closed his eyes and mouth, twisting his head to the side and sneezing out two fireballs that disappeared a few meters into the air.
“I have always known there was an inherent honor to our race. Something we were constantly reaching for and failing to grasp, but always there. An anti-predator rings true, for reasons I cannot comprehend yet. Does the fight ever have a conclusion? Do the predators die in defeat, or are they never-ending?”
“If we do our job adequately, the worlds where we find them and battle them are thus free of them forever after, but our battles do not end unless there is an end to the universe.”
“The frontier is never controlled,” the Dragon mewed, looking to the side as if in deep thought and barely recognizing that the Human was there. “Then Dominance is a means to an end, not the end itself?”
“You are confusing an ‘end’ with ‘victory conditions.’ On our worlds where we are victorious, we must remain present, else new predators will arise. They are like weeds, and will grow larger with time.”
“And poison your mind?”
Davis frowned. “No, weeds, not weed. English isn’t a very well-constructed language, and sometimes there are multiple definitions for the same word.”
“Then why have you not constructed a superior one to replace it?”
“Because we’d have to remake a lot of stuff in the new language that isn’t translatable. Things that were important metaphors. A bit illogical, but the concept of synonyms and homonyms offer an element of opportunity that straightforward languages lack. We didn’t want to give that up.”
“Subterfuge?”
“More for the humor.”
“It seems as if you preserve a level of stupidity just for the sake of giving your people practice rising above it.”
Davis froze, remaining stone cold for several seconds before visibly shaking off his epiphany. He’d been missing the obvious. “Not by choice, but perhaps an accidental benefit.”
“Perhaps the Zak’de’ron should have inoculated ourselves with a similar mechanism. I do not understand how such stupidity could take root so widespread. The others were not behaving so out of fear. I would have sensed it. They chose to embrace the illogic. The censorship. The intolerance. We no longer acted as many cells in one brain. We were acting as slaves.”
“Did this begin with the deal making?”
“No. We embraced the id
ea of leaving to rebuild away from the Hadarak surge, and away from you. The apprenticeship aspect came later, after we were already committed. Many did not like it, then the sickness arose and spread. It felt like a buzzing in their minds.”
Davis’s eyes narrowed sharply. “Did you scan any of them?”
“None would let me, though they insisted on scanning me when I began resisting too much. Their minds were closed, and I could not force my way in without bringing more trouble down upon me.”
“Did you plan on returning to this galaxy one day in the future?”
“Yes,” he said firmly, and angrily. “This was never to be a capitulation. Not in truth. You were meant to think so, but we always were meant to return after your war with the Hadarak was over, one way or another. This is our galaxy…and then we just abandoned it. It’s as if they told us one thing to start us moving, and once the change began they revealed their true intent with so much in motion we could not reverse course.”
“That is not what I was told. I was told that you put together convoys of your servants’ ships loaded with treasures you could not carry on your own, and you launched them across the galactic void to arrive more than a million years later at your destination…but you did so with a starting point inside this galaxy, so that if the deal fell through you could still recover them. That isn’t something that can’t be undone once in motion. It’s a contingency plan for such a reversal.”
“I know of no such convoys. The rare resources we could not take with us were cast into stars so you could not easily access them.”
“We’re going after the convoys. I’ve already sent the order. In a year or so we’ll find out if they exist or not.”
“What was your source? Has another Zak’de’ron stayed behind?”
“Unfortunately no. Was the deathmark the Neofan’s idea or the Zak’de’ron’s?”
“It was given to us as an edict from Zeno’dor, though it could have been him taking their orders. He has been broken long before the deal was struck. The most recent war caused something in him to snap, and he has been distant from us ever since. I had hoped this plan was a resumption of his wisdom, for it breathed life into us for a short time before the sickness came. But now I fear he has descended into madness and somehow taken the rest of my race with him.”