Chapter 26

..[ MATIVO ]..

Two Months later and I still didn’t know how to react to what had happened. Of the over hundred civilizations of all classes we had encountered, it had been the first time one of my own had been put in the mercy of a foe. To me, they had essentially been killed. They had been relented completely defenseless and their captors could have killed them at any time they wanted. Any way they wanted.

My first instincts were to go kill someone. I didn’t like people messing around with what I considered mine. Which all crew of my fleet were. But what would that accomplish for me? Who would I even kill? They had already killed most, if not all, of the ones responsible for the whole incident.

The captured crew had undergone intense questioning for the purposes of establishing how the situation had come to be. The few things I had learnt were unsettling and I decided a thorough research on the planet was in order. I didn’t want it to turn into another unsolved mystery just like the kidnapping incident. A message had been sent back to the Capital. It would take Months to reach it, but in less than two Years a dedicated research team would land on that planet. And then we will learn where exactly all the out of the ordinary things had come from.

Jacy, as well as the rest of the diplomats, had suggested a slower, more gradual integration of the planet into The Empire. After some very weird contacts, we had taken to assigning integration periods based on how a species compared to the more general culture of The Empire. Five Years was still the minimum, but some had proved to need a little more time. We weren’t trying to erase all cultures other than our own, but some things needed to go.

It was 18 AU, a Year and half since the expedition began. To be more precise, sixteen Months and three Weeks. Sylvia had finally caught up with the Swift Two Months before. I found her when I returned from my four Month tour of the portside of the net. She claimed that she left the Sho’sla System in the brink of joining The Empire officially. Unless something extremely drastic happened, it was a done deal. The Kirasai were still grumbling about this and that, but she thought that might become a constant for our whole relationship. For as long as it will last. I hoped not. An always complaining eternal partner was not worth it.

How long ago was that? To me, it felt a lot more than the Year the calendar claimed it had been. I had been to a lot of civilized worlds, a lot of them Class Five, but we had encountered some pretty interesting Class Four and Three civilizations too. /*DescribeSomeOfThem*/

Class Two civilizations were rare, having only encountered four so far, more than thirty /*Specify*/ light-Years from the Ũsumbĩ System. There was the three speciated Sho’sla System, the trigger happy glide-winged reptilian Kranga System, the third System and the adorable fourth System. The Class Two civilizations had proved very welcoming compared to the Class Three civilizations. More than two-thirds of those had been hostile. And not the good kind. And their civilizations were more or less unstable. Reasons? Multitude: crashing economies, crippling pandemics, out-to-kill-all weather systems, planet wide earthquakes and volcanoes, civil unrests, and a lot more others.

There had been no Class One civilization encountered. The situation at the Mbelisaf planet had hinted at a nearby such civilization but none had popped up on the net. Class Zero civilizations were nowhere to be found either.

The net itself had begun to get stretched thin, with the shuttles drifting further apart with each light-Year we advanced. There were gaps between the shuttles which were no longer getting explored, neither by the shuttles themselves nor the scanner arrays they had on board. They could still pick out habitable planets but determining if those planets were inhabited was proving harder and harder still. I had been contemplating slowing down considerably to allow the shuttles enough time to explore as much as they could. But if we did that, the explorers behind us would have nothing new to explore.

Keeping with the six Month shift for the shuttles was also proving difficult. Especially with the far flung ones at the edges of the net. Instead of getting a Month exploring on the shuttles and five Months off them, transporting the crew to and from the shuttles was eating away at some of the five Months. Other expedition activities such as the space battle simulations were suffering for it. We would have to collapse the net to a more manageable range soon.

…

The news that shuttle S08 had discovered a Class Three civilization was a welcome distraction; the news that it might be engulfed in a world war, not so much.

I had no qualms participating in a war. A planet already at war was like an orchard, with its keeper on the other side of the orchard dealing with the neighbors, leaving the fruits to be picked off freely. By the time they realized what I was doing, it would be too late for them. But at the same time, it could prove too disadvantageous. I just didn’t know how.

Yes, it was ripe for the picking. But how much of my resources would I need to invest to establish order? And how long would that take? There was no guarantee that the natives wouldn’t band together at the sight of me and decide that their differences didn’t matter anymore. I needed to maintain their enmity for a while longer as I established myself as a new power on the planet. And I had a well-rounded team of diplomats, politicians and political scientists to help with that. Our first order of business, gather as much information as we could about the situation on the planet.

The planet’s home was a G3V six-planet stellar system. The planet was the fourth from the star, orbiting at a distance of approximately one-seventy million kilometers from its star. The planet was around twenty percent larger than Ũsumbĩ IV with an approximated gravity of 1.19G. The three inner planets were all rocky; all of them progressively smaller than it. The two outer planets were massive super Jupiters.

I wasn’t planning on landing on the planet anytime soon. I decided to wait and see how it went before I let myself get pulled into a needless fight. I had other things to do; most pressing of which was training. No, not just physical training. Though, I did that too. Mental, or more accurately, intellectual training and managerial training. I might not be a leader but I was considered the lead figure on the Swift, and that came with duties I couldn’t ignore. I had dropped the management books I had been reading and started relying on the people I had on the ship to do that: Members of the three Councils. The Officers Council, the General Council and my personal Council. They mostly acted as a sheath to my totalitarianism. I still had to manage them though.

..[ ANDREW ]..

The one time he got to be in a high Class civilization and it was all war. He couldn’t have gotten a civilization made up of a peaceful species whose first thought was to welcome them in open arms. No. it was a race of blood thirsty werewolves. They weren’t, but they bore a very canine-like resemblance and they were very fight prone.

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They could have just left the civilization for a more well suited ship. One that had the time to try and diffuse the situation on the planet. But they were on the brink of turning their war into a nuclear war, and it didn’t seem like there was much left to loose for any of the sides.

The planet was made up of three main continents and a spattering of islands. There was the huge equator stranding land mass and then the smaller southern and northern continents. Everything was happening in the central continent. The first order issued had been reconnaissance. Several shuttles had dropped into the planet, landing in strategic places to more effectively infiltrate just about any major player on the planet. Due to the nature of the situation, all direct contact was prohibited except for the unwillingly captured natives for use in language learning and understanding the lay of the land.

A Month in and they had a much more in depth understanding of the situation. And more than half the shuttles had been ordered to reconvene on the stellar system, effectively collapsing the net. But it didn’t matter, they were close to ten thousand light-Years from their turning point and slightly ahead of schedule. Plus, during the last Officers Council, it had been determined that the collapse was long overdue and they could explore the region more thoroughly when they made the turn.

The natives were werewolf like as first noted. They were generally tall, with the average height being around two meters. They had a strong robust frame which was filled with muscles, for the few Andrew had seen. They had large ellipsoidal ears at the top of their heads. Their heads were covered with either of four colors; black, brown, grey or white. Slight mixtures existed but those were the main ones. Andrew wasn’t sure whether the greys and whites were due to age or natural coloration.

The heads bulged a lot on the back. To accommodate the brain size needed to become a civilized species, no doubt. He also noticed that they had skin tones varying from true black to near white.

They had a strong protruded nose, and jaws giving them the appearance of a snout. Their noses and lips were either black or brown. Some of them appeared to possess facial hair, though only the sideburns ending at the back of the jaws. Andrew had assumed those to be males. They also appeared taller and larger than their counterparts. Their teeth were sharp jagged things made for tearing through flesh. The few eyes he had spotted were either golden yellow or brown, with sharply upward slanted outer edges.

They had well defined hands with signs of hair on the outside of their arms which got thick towards the back of the hands. The hands were human looking with nails for claws. Their legs were long and lean with abnormally long slender feet, more than twice the feet of an average human. He had seen some of them stand on their balls of their feet with them, to cower an opponent into submission with the impressive height gained.

They lived in towns and cities that were not that much different from those back on Earth. The black tarmacked roads divided in the middle by white lines that traversed all over the three continents; the concrete, steel and glass buildings that made up cities. They had seen those illuminated by primarily white and bluish lights at night. With the largest single concentration of lights in the middle of the northern continent. No trains though, but there was plenty of airplanes and ships to make up for it.

Surprisingly, there had been no satellites orbiting the planet other than their sole natural satellite and its companion. But they did have what could be described as computers and handheld communication devices. Their radio bubble had been just past the fifty light-Year mark. Compared with Earth’s radio bubble, they weren’t that far behind. If only they hadn’t begun the world war at such a time, they might have made it to a Class Two categorization.

According to the information they had gathered from their own spies, the three continents had been divided into nations that had seen little border change for over hundred Years before the arms race began. All the new technologies had been discovered in the two pole continents and then spilled over into the middle continent. It had always been trying to catch up with the other two continents, but could never manage it.

Around fifty Years earlier, one of the southern leading nations had started bringing its neighbors under one flag. Through alliances, and military threats were necessary, effectively shifting the balance of power on the planet. Seeing this, their northern counterparts had quickly banded together and began preparing for war. The end product; discovery of nuclear weapons on the northern side. The southern side had not been satisfied with merely its territories, so it had set its sights on the less powerful central continent. The northerners followed suit and the two super powers clashed around the equator. By then, the southern powers had discovered nuclear weapons too and a treaty was quickly signed between the two continents to prevent their use in war. As long as each side stayed on their side of the equator.

But that treaty didn’t say they couldn’t fight with the conventional weapons. It also failed to consider the opinions of their so called central allies. Within two decades, the central nations began pushing back their overlords. And predictably, the two sides began accusing each other of supporting the central nations on the other side of the equator.

It was in that pan of turmoil and war they had walked into. The two nuclear-powered super powers were both accusing the other side of violating the treaty. They began sending spies in large numbers across the equator into enemy territory. They also began persecuting any who showed any signs of sympathizing with the opposite side, or the central nations fighting for their freedom.

They weren’t considering the central nations’ fighting forces as autonomous governments, rather terrorist organizations funded for by the other side. They saw it as their duty to free them of these terrorists and offer a guiding hand into the bright future they could enjoy under their supervision.

But some of the captured enemy spies had begun claiming to be working on orders from the other side. Or so the interrogators told their superiors on both sides. Either the so called spies were only saying what the interrogators wanted to hear or the interrogators were lying to their superiors. Whatever the case was, the superiors on both sides had started holding meetings on whether to bring out the nuclear weapons.

Andrew could understand why. There was no longer anything left to fight over in the middle continent. Most of everything had either been exploited or devastated during the war. And the central nations began sending suicide bombers across the seas to the invading powers home turfs. If one of the bigger cities got hit, or even one of the suicide bombs became successful in killing a lot of people, it could be the push that plunged the whole planet into nuclear catastrophe.

Mativo didn’t want that and he had send teams to secure and disarm all the nuclear weapons they had discovered. At the same time, teams had been dispatched to all the active frontlines to stop the hostile and bring the warring nations to heel.

Andrew didn’t think that would be possible. They were more likely to just assume that they were sent by the other side and be convinced that they really had no choice but to use the best weapons they had at their disposals. Andrew hoped that the ‘secure-and-disarm’ teams would be successful in their missions. Plans had been established to capture and redirect any fired missiles and rockets. They were sound, Andrew would give them that, but they were also untested. The shuttles could take a nuclear explosion, he was sure. But how many of those could they take before their shields failed?

Andrew was part of one of the teams that had been sent to the warfronts. His teams’ destination was one of the most fought over areas in the northern frontlines. What had once been the largest, most developed city in the entirety of the central continent. It had been reduced to nothing more than smoldering ruins over the course of the takeover and fight for freedom. Its inhabitants were either dead or spread all over the central continent. All that was left were the fighters, the fighting, bombings and the most daring of scavengers. Apparently, every food web had them. They were mostly large birds with two meter wingspans with sickly grey feathers all over their bodies. Except from their heads to their chests, it was a bare blackened skin. Andrew could smell their stench from more than fifty meters away. They had a species of four-legged animal shorter than half a meter that barely let anyone get close enough to know exactly what it looked like. Not even the flying scavengers.

The central nations’ forces had been easy to subdue. They had surrendered fast when they realized that they were a different kind of foe. Not disarming them and the promise that their leaders would soon notify them of the reason for their presence might have had a lot to do it. But not as much as watching their opponents decimated.

The northern troops had refused to surrender and Andrew’s group had been forced to show them just how much of a power difference they had over them. They hadn’t pushed them that far back, but that could change if their leaders didn’t call off the attacks soon enough.