There was no response from the aliens after Peter sent the message. And more importantly, the alien ships weren’t slowing down.

In fact, they were speeding up. But it was odd because they weren’t moving at near light speeds. They looked to be moving in slow motion.

“How technologically advanced are the aliens?” Peter asked the group but clearly pointing the question at Icarus.

“From what I saw, they were using a lot of older human tech.” Icarus paused for a moment. “But I didn’t visit any of their most advanced countries, so I can’t be sure.”

“You need to move,” Ship said to the group, warning them to take evasive action. “Randomize your movements.”

Peter’s own ship weaved one way and then another. They all began exiting the system, jinking and changing directions so that the Atua couldn’t get a lock on target.

Peter and the rest of the group were quickly gaining distance away from the Atua home world. They were escaping faster, and their attackers weren’t able to match pace.

Peter began to understand that these aliens didn’t have access to any near-light-speed travel. They were limited to slower speeds that seemed similar to what the team had had before Angelique had shared the newer technology with them.

Peter was about to comment that he believed the aliens were only scaring them away when he received confirmation they were fired on by a strong laser weapon. They’d only escaped before through random luck.

“They’re firing on us,” Peter said to the group.

“I know,” the Ship of Atlas replied in a strained voice.

There were a couple faces around the group that froze before their avatars faded away.

“They hit two of our ships,” Ship said. “I’m seeing Hosanna and Dejuan go offline.”

These were part of a two-person crew on one of their warships.

“Move, people,” Atlas demanded. “We’re getting hit.”

Another of the team members disappeared. This time Jayden, who was out on one of the spacecraft alone.

They were dropping like flies.

“We have one weapon that could end this battle before it gets carried away,” Peter suggested—saying out loud what he was convinced the others were thinking. He couldn’t have been the only person who’d tried to use the weapon earlier only to find out that Atlas had set some kind of restriction on its use.

“No,” Atlas said, kind of forcefully. “We’re not wiping them out of existence.” Atlas chewed his lip, consuming more and more of it. He was turning around in a circle. He looked deep in thought. “Screw it,” he said before disappearing.

Peter wondered what that meant. What was going through Atlas’s mind? Was he going to use the weapon? Had a line just been crossed by the aliens, and now they were paying the ultimate consequences?

Peter couldn’t do much but keep moving away from the alien world. But he turned the sensors on his warship toward Atlas’s.

Because none of the spacecraft were connected to one another, they couldn’t share resources or information. So Peter was limited to monitoring the team through the lag of light speed.

What he was watching was a noticeable tenths-of-a-millisecond delay, which objectively was a short time, but when a war was happening and people were fighting, it might as well be a lifetime.

Peter watched as Atlas and Ship turned their spacecraft around. The nose of the vehicle briefly faced the planet, and Peter wondered whether they were going to fire.

The belief was quickly evaporated when Atlas kept turning.

“He’s going to use it on the enemy weapons,” Peter muttered to himself.

Atlas raced toward the enemy ships at speeds none of the enemy spacecraft could match. Because it was near light speed, the enemy would most likely only register Atlas had moved when he was right in front of them.

Atlas and Ship weaved in random directions. They were closing the distance, and as they passed the enemy ships, a wave rippled out.

Then they were crushed into a ball. One. Then two. Then three. One after another, Atlas was racing past the alien ships or warheads and turning them into perfectly spherical balls.

“Oh,” Peter said, realizing what he was looking at. “Atlas is using the tractor beam to crush them.”

Peter hadn’t realized that was possible. But then again, Atlas had built the weapon and knew its ins and outs. Peter knew that part of the special weapon was the capability of crushing pallets of material into black holes. So maybe Atlas was repurposing the tool to crush these alien ships.

Atlas was making quick work of the alien spacecraft, racing past them one at a time and leaving behind floating perfectly circular giant marbles.

Peter couldn’t believe his eyes. The creativity of what was happening. It was a total one-sided affair. Atlas was stomping all over them.

“This has to be bad for their egos,” Peter said as more of the alien ships fell.

Unity looked at him fully. “What are you talking about?”

Unity obviously hadn’t yet begun to take in the changing landscape. She was obviously fully concentrating on what was going on.

“Atlas and Ship are turning them all into bowling balls,” Peter said, holding up a projected replay of the crippling effect Atlas was having on the aliens.

Atlas was single-handedly showing the aliens just how big the technological gap between them and humanity was.

Humanity was no longer a bug under the foot of these aliens. Humanity was a galaxy-wide superpower.

Peter couldn’t help but smile at what he was seeing. They really had nothing to worry about.

“This whole time, the Atua were bluffing,” Peter said, slightly proud of what Atlas was doing. “They possessed no advanced technology capable of hurting us.”

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“I’m going to guess that much of the tech they have was created by us and stolen by them,” Unity added.

Atlas and Ship made quick work of the alien spacecraft, leaving two hundred spherical objects completely crushed in their wake.

“Okay, I’m back,” Atlas said as he and Ship arrived back in the room.

The room erupted in applause.

“Aw, it was mostly Ship,” Atlas said, patting his Ship on the shoulder.

“Atlas came up with the idea to use the weapon like that,” Ship said, diverting the praise back to Atlas.

“What do we do now?” Peter asked, bringing the conversation back to the present. Yes, they had successfully pushed back the enemy’s attack. But they still hadn’t achieved what they’d come for.

“We leave?” Atlas suggested. “We’ve proved they don’t have any weapons capable of hurting us.”

It was Peter’s turn to think hard about a problem. “Let’s see if they’re willing to open a dialogue.”

Heads around the room nodded in agreement.

“You do the talking this time,” Rose said.

“Okay,” Peter said as his crew opened up a channel with the planet below.

“We would like to negotiate again,” Peter said into an invisible mic.

The response was quick. They were obviously waiting on them to hail them.

“Stupid humans.”

That was not the response Peter was looking for. “I don’t think your translation is working properly. We’re wanting to renegotiate a peace treaty.”

Peter recognized the voice as the alien spoke louder this time. It was Nukchuk. “This will not stand. We will not rest until you are destroyed.”

“You can’t hurt us; you need to chill.”

“You don’t understand us, do you? We would rather die than submit to your control.”

“We’re not asking for you to submit to us. We’re simply asking for agreement that both our species will leave each other alone.”

“There is only space in this galaxy for one dominant species. It’s either you or us. If you leave now, then we will go after you eventually.”

Peter was so confused. Why was this alien being so antagonistic? He didn’t quite understand any of it. Why would an alien species be proactively asking for them to kill them?

Peter disconnected from the broadcast. “Why are they asking us to destroy them?”

Everyone around the group shrugged. No one had a clue.

“I believe I can answer this,” Icarus said, speaking for the first time in a while. “The Atua have a very favorable belief in themselves. They believe they’re above us. And they think that if we could destroy them, we would; hence if we don’t destroy them—even though they’re encouraging us to do that—then that means we’re ultimately scared.”

“Are you saying they have a big ego?” Peter said.

“Ego isn’t quite the right word. But it’s close enough.”

“I’ve negotiated with people who have big egos. As long as they believe they’ve won, then they’re happy.” Peter thought about the situation a little longer. “If we leave, will this be counted as a win for them? And then will they leave us alone?”

“I don’t think so. I think they won’t be happy until we’re enslaved again.”

Angelique looked at Icarus as if he was hinting at something. “So what are our options? Destroy them now, otherwise we’ll eventually end up in a war?”

Atlas had been sitting in the corner, biting his lower lip, deep in thought for a while. “With your knowledge of them, what is scarier to them than utter destruction?”

Icarus looked at his Ship, and they both gave each other a look. “Loss of control.”

“Can you broadcast this message to the surface of the planet?”

Icarus turned forward as if facing an invisible camera. “Tuk tuk, chuaka—” He started to speak directly in the alien language, completely skipping the need for the alien to translate it. Icarus began to change his avatar, and within a few seconds, both he and Ship changed completely into images of Penquins.

Their message went on for some time. Ship chimed in a couple of times, adding a bit more information.

When it was all done, Icarus nodded. “Send it.”

“What did you say?” Atlas asked.

“I told them that if they don’t negotiate with us, then we will go to the surface of their planet and pick up all the Penquins who want to come with us. I told them that we will give the Penquins another planet protected by us. We will help them with technology to enable them to repopulate without Atua. And most importantly, we will give them advanced enough technology that they will become more advanced than the Atua.”

The Ship of Atlas also added, “By broadcasting in their local language, we also told them that we are willing to broadcast messages to their people that the Atua can’t control. I bet they’re currently scrambling to explain this message to the Penquin population down there.”

The response didn’t come back for a while.

A growling sound came through the speakers as the message was sounded on a loudspeaker: “This is Alkuka.”

Again, the message came through in English. Peter assumed this was to make sure the Penquins couldn’t understand what was being said.

Icarus’s face was one of excitement. “That’s their supreme leader. That’s the oldest Atua alive. You’re speaking to the very top of their population.”

“These are the terms,” Alkuka said. “You are to give us the technology for the weapon. You give us the technology for your near-light-speed propulsion. We will leave you alone. We will leave Earth alone. We will remove the virus from that planet.”

“We’re not giving them any technology,” Angelique said to the group but not to the Atua.

Peter agreed; it wasn’t in their interest to enable the alien more advanced technology.

“Their ships are several generations behind ours,” Atlas said. “We could give them a big improvement to propulsion but based on technology completely different to what we use now. That way it wouldn’t give them any clue as to how our current ships work.”

Peter thought that was a good idea. He addressed the speaker again. “The weapon and the propulsion method we’re using isn’t ours to give away. But we can offer you a method of travel that is more powerful than what you are currently using, in exchange for freeing Earth and agreement that our two species will begin to trade with each other.”

“Why do you want to trade with them?” Angelique whispered.

“On Earth, we found that when two countries traded regularly, they had fewer wars with each other,” Peter said. “I think the same will occur here. We gain a better understanding of the Atua and Penquins, and they understand us better.”

“Our species evolved underwater; we are not well adapted to even the smallest amount of radiation. We cannot travel between stars like you,” the alien spat as if indicating something was dirty. “And we would not soil ourselves by becoming simulations.”

“You can remote control them through the Starnet,” Peter offered.

“Your Starnet is too susceptible to hacking; we do not trust it enough to use reliably.”

Peter looked at Atlas as if to say, Can they intercept our Starnet communication?

Knowing the implied question, Atlas responded. “I think Alkuka means they don’t understand it well enough to trust it’s safe. Even we don’t fully grasp how quantum entanglement works.”

The team went back and forth for a long time with the Atua, the two species trying to find common ground and agreement.

Icarus was right; the one thing that the Atua were most afraid of was losing another species under their control. They considered humanity coming up from under their stronghold a mistake that should have never happened. But they didn’t want to lose control of the Penquins.

Icarus explained that it wasn’t all bad for the Penquins. They’d evolved with the Atua so didn’t see it as a form of slavery.

It was clear that humanity had progressed far beyond anything that the Atua were capable of. The catalyst of the explosion in technological progress among humans was the day the beta explorers left Mars. That one moment meant humanity was no longer hamstrung by the Atua’s manipulative AI and was allowed to blossom. The technology gap between the two planets was so big, but the Atua didn’t care. The only thing that got them to the negotiating table was the threat of losing the Penquins too.

Once that credible threat was in place, once the Atua feared having another species overtake them, they became open to dialogue.

And once negotiations had progressed for some time, it was clear the Atua wanted more technology. They had aspirations to go beyond their solar system. Atua bodies were much more susceptible to damage by radiation so they could not survive travel between stars. Atlas was confident he could use the stealthfield to build a shield capable of protecting the Atua from the immense radiation all spacecrafts were exposed to outside of the cloud. That was what they wanted most of all, a way for them to truly travel between the stars. Not as a simulation, because it was clear they saw uploaded minds—or simulations—as inferior copies of the originals. And they saw becoming a simulation as a process that was unbecoming.

“That is agreeable,” Alkuka said at the conclusion of the discussions. “Our two species will no longer be at war. We will begin regular trade once you have helped us establish our own colony in another star system.”

The Atua were great negotiators, and they ultimately got what they really wanted. The team was happy to provide them with it too, because they believed the universe would get a lot more interesting once humanity was in regular contact with another sentient alien.