Ru'udamo'o was a former Executor covert action specialist. He was a shadow in the system, the suggestion of a shadow, a hint of an existence and he was fine with that. He had served the Unified Civilized Council's peoples for three thousand years. When the C3 and it's collateral damage started he had sought out the forbidden to consult. The Herd Stallion. The Herd Matron. He did not fear their power, he sought their wisdom to understand where they intended on guiding the Great Herd.
He, more than anyone, understood that the Civilized Council was nothing more than a brackish swamp slowly drying away to salt plains. That in a hundred million years his people had managed to do little more than destroy star systems to feed an overwhelming appetite they didn't even understand.
He had watched the C3 War with interest. For the first time in the Council's history they weren't facing off against a species that had barely developed space travel and stellar class combat weapons with only a few systems for resources and manufacturing. Every scrap of information he could gather on the Confederacy pointed to thousands of systems, multiple species, heavy industrial capacity and capability, massive shipyards, research programs, and the infrastructure to prosecute interstellar wars.
While his peers and superiors (or those who saw themselves as his superior) just hand-waved away the eight thousand years of interstellar travel for the lemurs, Ru'udamo'o examined it closely.
It was doing a deep data dive on the Confederacy that he discovered a simple fact that the lemurs and their allies ignored.
The longest period of peace the Confederacy had enjoyed was an astounding 63 days.
The Confederacy was made up of aligned systems, not a single system under the rulership of the Senate.
Ru'udamo'o had found out that there were nearly 58 human stellar organizations withing the Confederacy. The Mantids had three. The Treana'ad only one. The Rigellian Suarian Compact covered over a dozen species, many with their own stellar governments owning multiple stellar systems.
Even during the C3 War, the Confederacy was actively fighting in their own territory against 'Rogue Nation States" of various species.
He also discovered some very interesting information.
The Mar-gite War was followed by the Mithril Nebula Conflict which was followed by the Clownface Nebula Conflict. The Clownface Nebula Conflict was a misleading name, as the Confederacy actually fought a seven front war, against multiple breakaway states, the Clownface Nebula Systems acting as the primary belligerent.
Ru'udamo'o estimated that the lemurs had forgotten more about warfare than the Lanaktallan had ever learned.
He also estimated that 70-85% of the Confederate Armed Services had more than five years of combat experience. Roughly 45% of the Confederate Armed Services had more than a century of combat under their belts in everything from planetary assaults to bitter urban warfare to intrasystem ship to ship combat.
Lemur and Confederate military equipment had a shelf-life of roughly 10-25 years before refinement, upgrading, and replacement. The idea of "Service Life Extension Programs" was a novel idea and the fact it allowed them to modularly upgrade war fighting equipment was another tic in the boxes. The weapons that lasted longer than a few hundred years relatively unchanged were famous and considered the backbone of whatever section they were in.
Additionally, the lemurs had differing theories of warfare, largely based on "Generation" of warfare.
They also had nearly two dozens types of warfare, from 'surgical covert action' (which he appreciated deeply) to 'Total War', which was what the Confederacy had pushed forward against the Council once word had gotten out about the attacks on the Harmonous Cluster and what Ru'udamo'o considered atrocities had been revealed.
Examining the historical documents, biographies, even the fiction, of the Confederate Covert Action made Ru'udamo'o nod along. Their theorems and practical knowledge were far beyond what a youthful organization such as the Confederacy should be capable of.
He then looked at the lemurs allies. He could tell, even by their social media and entertainment media, that the lemurs had been just as influenced by their allies as their allies had been by them.
No self-respecting Lanaktallan would have allowed neo-sapients to influence them.
The juggernaut of Confederate culture, which was already used to multiple alien viewpoints, would crush the non-existent Council culture. This, Ru'udamo'o would have been willing to bet, to use a Terran term, his left nut on.
He had, out of duty and loyalty, attempted to make his fellow Executor Council Agents understand what he was seeing.
His estimations fell of deaf ears.
When the gold mantid Dreams of Something More had landed and demanded the unilateral and unconditional surrender of the Council, Ru'udamo'o had nodded sagely.
While his peers rubbed their hands and estimated it would take no longer than two hundred years to suborn the Confederacy and restore Lanaktallan to dominance, Ru'udamo'o had known better.
While carrying out important missions, Ru'udamo'o had watched his fellow Lanaktallan. How they had at first resisted and then gleefully participated in Confederate culture.
Where speech on GalNet had been heavily censored, any being could say anything to another being provided it wasn't an actionable threat. Feelings didn't matter. Rank didn't matter. Species didn't matter. Emotional impact was often the desired result of postings on GalNet.
Ru'udamo'o had watched a 'flame war' with interest. Despite the tens of thousands of reports on posts for "deliberate emotional damage" nothing was done beyond "Stop crying" by the moderators with a second warning being the offended being banned from the thread, subforum, forum, or VR space.
There were 'safe' areas, where speech and images and VR interactions were carefully monitored.
Ru'udamo'o's peers had stuffily stated that most sentient beings would gravitate toward the more monitored areas and the 'free for all zones' would eventually go away within weeks.
Instead, Ru'udamo'o had seen elderly and refined Matrons throw out slurs at other Matrons over the exact amount of fructose in a dessert. Insults and slurs that would have resulted in prison times or even rehabilitation prior to the Council's surrender.
While other Executors viewed what went on in the depths of GalNet to be of no concern to the 'real world' as they put it, Ru'udamo'o believed otherwise.
The other Executors as well as the Mental Hygiene Specialists were all confused over how so many Lanaktallan took to the 'video games', the more complicated and micromanaging and expansive, the better.
Ru'udamo'o had already discovered the definition of what those Lanaktallan, many of whom had risen to Great Most High or better, seemed to enjoy so much about those video games.
Grinding. The idea of doing the same thing over and over until they got it perfect or to 'farm' a repeatable task to stack up the benefits.
Ru'udamo'o understood what 'grinding' satiated in the Lanaktallan soul.
The need to show dominance over other Lanaktallan without exposing oneself to real world risk.
Ru'udamo'o knew that the things he had done as the treaties were being signed, as each system governor surrendered to Dreams of Something More and the government she represented, would eventually be discovered and many would react with horror.
Some would view what he did as 'covering up war crimes' but that was not how he saw it.
It would take years, decades, centuries to untangle everything he had done.
Executing scientists and government officials who had authorized the experiments. Wiping the data after securing a copy and ensuring a copy of what had been done was delivered to Dreams as well as to the ancient AI Deus. Destroying lab facilities.
He wasn't covering up anything.
Ru'udamo'o just believed that if, on the eve of the surrender, if some blindly self-righteous Most High proudly proclaimed what had been done during the war, it would make it that much harder for peace between the Lanaktallan and all they had abused would be that much harder.
Personally, Ru'udamo'o knew it was only the lessons of the Confederacy and the Mad Lemurs of Terra that made such sentients as the Telkan fight so hard to protect the Lanaktallan, the very people that had brutalized theirs.
Ru'udamo'o believed that the Lanaktallan were on the cusp of a new golden age. An age of expansion, of pulling his people back from being mindless drug-stunned zombies stumbling through life contributing nothing and only consuming. An age of greatness, striding forward into the future next to the Lemurs and their allies.
While other Lanaktallan believed the Mad Lemurs of Terra were now largely extinct, Ru'udamo'o believed no such thing.
Stolen story; please report.
Enough of the Mad Lemurs of Terra still survived on their "LARP Worlds" and the "Locusts" and the "Martial Orders" as well as "The Last Fleet" and a handful of other worlds.
An extinct race did not number forty million across multiple worlds.
That and Deus had told Ru'udamo'o more than once, during their long talks, that it wasn't the first time the Mad Lemurs of Terra had been nearly obliterated.
Ru'udamo'o knew that the majority of intelligent species would have given up after such a mass die off. That the huge amount of deaths would have left the Lemurs a depressed, despondent race that would have just surrendered to entropy.
Deus had told Ru'udamo'o that such a setback, such a terrible depopulation of what was nearly a xenocide, would do nothing more than galvanize the remainder.
Where others would close their eyes and surrender to inevitability, surrender to entropy, allowing themselves to drift away on a haze of neurochemicals, the Mad Lemurs of Terra would instead scream and pound against the gates.
The ancient AI Deus, programmed before the Great Glassing during the height of the Age of Paranoia, had simply told Ru'udamo'o that the Terrans would be back. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week or even next year or decade.
But they would be back.
Which was why Ru'udamo'o looked at his work as so vitally important.
The stains he was cleaning up, those terrible blots upon the Council and all of the species who were part of it, could not be allowed to be unpunished. He was cleaning them, he wanted them to take decades or centuries to be fully exposed to the general public, but he did not want the Lanaktallan permanently stained by them.
Oh, the ones who had committed or authorized them deserved what they got at Ru'udamo'o's hands as far as he was concerned.
But the Matron sitting eating ice cream with a Telkan Matron and a Hamaroosa Matron did not deserve to have her hide permanently blotted by what amoral scientists had performed without her knowledge or consent.
We are not at war with your people, we are at war with your government and those who enable it, he heard a lemur's voice say in his memories.
What had convinced Ru'udamo'o about the difference was simple.
The Lanaktallan, and the Council, said: Surrender and be destroyed.
The Lemurs, and the Confederacy, said: Surrender OR be destroyed.
One word.
To Ru'udamo'o, that summed up the difference between the Council and the Confederacy.
Freedom of choice.
His fellow Executors viewed the Confederacy's Freedom of Self-Determination, one of their basic rights, as something terrifying, something that should be kept out of the hands of the populace, and something that would destroy everything that everyone had worked so hard for.
To Ru'udamo'o, his fellow former Executors complaining that the Right of Self-Determination would destroy everything while they sat, unemployed and outcast, in the ruins of the Unified Council, was a thing of comedy.
Ru'udamo'o smiled to himself as the Telkan Matron talked about how her son had lost his life savings gambling on the interstellar stock market but her daughter had reversed the family's fortunes by starring in a GalTube VR mini-series where she played Brentili'ik, the System Director of the Telkan system.
The other two matrons nodded regally as the Telkan Matron stated that her son had stated that it was gratifying even to lose, even to fail, as long as he had been the one to try and he failed due to his own decisions.
Nobody really noticed the small group that came in and was seated at Ru'udamo'o's table.
The gold mantid nervously cleaned her antenna, glancing at the black and the green ones with her.
The human was what had Ru'udamo'o's attention.
Pale skin, cold clear green eyes, a light dusting of melanin spots across his cheeks and arms, yellow hair, and thick with corded muscle.
He looked positively malevolent.
"My compatriots 117 and Words Spoken We Fear," the gold mantid stated. She pointed at the Terran. "Sergeant Sarpong, Diplomatic Services"
"Madame diplomat," Ru'udamo'o rumbled. He nodded at each, then slid a holocube across the table. "This is the evidence compiled on the chemical warfare tests performed on Terran civilians as well as video of the executions of the scientists, politicians, industrialists, and others involved in the testing as well as the authorization and support of the testing."
Dreams just nodded slowly.
Ru'udamo'o had to admit, he was gratified and surprised that the mantid diplomat never tried to talk him out of his self-appointed task, never reacted with horror at the actions he had undertaken, just calmly accepted his evidence.
"How thick is your targeting pool?" Speaks asked, picking up the dataslate and ordering a quick meal.
Ru'udamo'o shrugged. "Not as thick as it once was. I can now see the ones swimming in the darker depths," the Lanaktallan replied.
"We have a few names that need to be handled delicately or crossed off the targeting list," Dreams said. She slid a read-once datacube to Ru'udamo'o. "They are important to the negotiations. Once they have served their usefulness then we have particular ways we wish them to be handled if your people still deem it necessary."
Ru'udamo'o nodded, feeling satisfaction that the gold mantid was as cold blooded as she needed to be. He tapped the datacube, downloading the data to the secure storage wetware embedded in his brain. The cube shivered and dissolved into droplets of water that Speaks wiped up with a napkin.
"Two of those names are in my targeting pool. The others I will ensure are guarded and eliminated when the time comes, if necessary," Ru'udamo'o stated. He stared at Dreams. "I appreciate the Confederacy's ruthlessness in this matter."
Dreams brushed her antenna. "To quote a Terran philosopher: Some men, you just can't reach. So you get what we've got here, which is the way they want it. Well, they get it. I don't like it any more than you do. Our hands are tied. The billions sway from side to side, the war goes on with brainless pride, and history will hide the lies and blood of our wars."
Ru'udamo'o smiled at the waitress, who smiled back, then waited for her to leave, thinking about what the gold mantid had said. It had the feeling of an older saying, with missing contexts. He tapped the straw in the delicious drink that the lemurs had introduced, a 'cookie dough and butterscotch milkshake' and enjoyed the tactile sensation of how much frozen resistance there was to the straw's movement.
"A lemur philospher," Ru'udamo'o guessed.
Dreams nodded. "Early Resource Wars Era," she confirmed.
Ru'udamo'o shook his head. "It is telling how the lemur's history is not broken up by such things as 'The Eighth Reconciliation of Thought' but rather 'The Burger Wars' or 'Chromed Amazonian Conflict' or the 'War of the Locust and Sparrow' and other such conflicts."
The mosizlak smiled and chuckled, reaching out and picking up what Ru'udamo'o had learned was a spicy curly-fry.
"Terrans have never met a fight they didn't want to be part of," Dreams smiled, combing her antenna.
There was silence for a time.
"How is Deus?" Dreams asked suddenly.
Ru'udamo'o could sense she had timed it to gain a slight edge in a sudden shift of tone and subject.
"Digital," Ru'udamo'o answered. "Lurking. Watching. Thinking."
Dreams nodded. "Pass him my appreciation."
"I will," Ru'udamo'o said. "Upon our next meeting."
Dreams nodded again.
"Have you given any more thought to joining Confederate Intelligence Services?" Dreams asked.
Ru'udamo'o signified amused pleasure. "Madame diplomat, let us not pretend I am too ignorant to realize I am deeply in the service of Confederate Intelligence."
Dreams gave a slight smirk.
"There is much to do within the Unified Council's previous domain for one such as I. Unlike many of my so-called peers, I harbor no illusions regarding the fact that Confederate Intelligence is now my shot caller," Ru'udamo'o stated. "I am too valuable to throw away, too dangerous to attempt to eliminate, too crafty and experienced to stumble around blindly."
Speaks nodded at that, chewing on the tip of a 'french fry' thoughtfully.
"I find the support and attention to detail withing the Confederate Intelligence Service to be very gratifying. Even when one of my tasks encounters impossible to foresee complications I have yet to sense panic, only a shifting of priorities and viewpoints," Ru'udamo'o stated.
"Nothing like having your control panic just because LawSec walked by," Speaks said conversationally.
Ru'udamo'o nodded. "Indeed," he paused for a moment. "I am also particularly aware of how organizations like Confederate Intelligence work toward the end of an agent's usefulness."
Dreams raised one antenna. "Really?"
Ru'udamo'o nodded. "Eventually, I will have to be eliminated to make way for more modern and less biased and age slowed agents."
The Lanaktallan waited for either denial or confirmation and was surprised when the mosizlak gave a 'snerk' of amusement.
"What is the cause for humor?" Ru'udamo'o asked calmly.
"You should research the Born Intelligence Agency Dilemma," Speaks said.
Ru'udamo'o looked it up on his datalink.
Any agent skilled and knowledgeable enough to reach the age or circumstances of mandatory black list retirement is fifteen times more dangerous to the agency attempting to pasteurize them than it is for the sponsoring government to allow the agent to grow old and cease life functions in comfort regardless of the knowledge possessed by the agent that they may or may not realize they possess.
It was followed by: The carnage surrounding an involuntary kinetic retirement of a highly skilled agent will bring to light more damaging and larger volumes of data than the intelligence agency is attempting to suppress.
Ru'udamo'o took a sip of his shake, thinking.
"The Executor Intelligence Services believed that once an agent has reached the end of his usefulness they should be terminated," Ru'udamo'o mused.
"Allow me a slight anecdote," Speaks said, tapping a fry against his plate. Ru'udamo'o nodded. "Let us postulate that eighty years ago an agent took part in replacing the head of government for a star system and then assisted that head of state in consolidating power and protecting itself from any challenges or direct action."
Ru'udamo'o nodded.
"Now, the Executor Intelligence Services then eliminates that agent once the star system is firmly in the system," the black mantid said.
Again, Ru'udamo'o nodded.
"Now, you have recently been ordered to ensure that the head of state is eliminated with the chains of authority still remaining intact," Speaks said. He nibbled on the fry. "Who do you go to for on-the-ground data and advice?"
Ru'udamo'o thought. "Historically, I would be forced to look over redacted and edited after action reports. I would have no contacts on the ground or in systems," he took a sip of his shake. "You're suggesting that the optimum resource would be the former agent."
Speaks nodded. "Who is living in comfort and still advising younger agents and handlers."
"Creating a force multiplier that the Executor Council lacks," Ru'udamo'o said.
"Did they give you the equivalent of the 'Operative Outlook'?" Speaks asked.
We will create a perfect world. A better world. A world without sin. However, I will not be allowed to live in it.
Ru'udamo'o nodded.
It was Dreams who tapped her plate with one bladearm, spearing a pickled vegetable.
"What such nihilistic outlooks forget is that the gardener does not live in the garden," she said softly. "As long as he keeps his tools ready and watches carefully, the garden will thrive. A garden without a tender becomes nothing more than a jungle."
Ru'udamo'o sat and thought about it, enjoying his shake.
The Lanaktallan Matron and the Telkan Matron were listening raptly to the Hamaroosa Matron describing the dedication of the memorial to the Hamaroosan hero Sandy.
He looked around slowly, taking a deep drink of his shake, his feeding tendrils touching the slight gaps in the straw, enjoying the thick and rich taste.
Around him were all manner of species of the former Council and the Confederacy. They were all chatting, smiling, confident in their own safety.
He set down his frosted glass and nodded.
"And someone must ensure the garden is safe from predators and those who would seek to destroy it."
-----
The Lanaktallan industrialist squealed when Ru'udamo'o slammed his upper torso onto the hood of his car. Ru'udamo'o pressed his hand against the side of the other Lanaktallan's face, holding his head still as he pushed the barrel of the Terran Confederate Armed Services mag-ac pistol into the other Lanaktallan's ear.
"There was never far enough for you to run, blah-bleh-blah," Ru'udamo'o said, quoting the fearsome Night Terran.
The industrialist wet himself.
"You should have stuck to industry instead of dabbling in terrorism."
The mag-ac coughed.
Ru'udamo'o trotted away as the industrialist's body slid down the hood of the car and crumpled in front of the bumper.