Eirian waved at the kitchen area, tapping a series of commands into a holographic screen and waiting for a bottle of dark green alcoholic liquid and a pair of small wooden bowls to drift over before she answered Zayd’s question. “Sip this slowly,” she warned, pouring him several ounces of the potent liquor. “It’s not just alcohol, it helps to stimulate the mind,” she explained. “This sort of beverage is favored by scholars to both relax and engage in academic conversations. The neural enhancers should be just as effective on you as they are on Fae but you should go slowly.”
“This kind of thing must be expensive,” Zayd said, taking a small sip of the bright, citrus-flavored liquor and savoring the taste as a warmth spread outward from his stomach. “I can’t imagine that just anyone gets to enjoy this.”
“You would do well to adjust your expectations,” Eirian said with a laugh, taking a larger sip from her own bowl. “Students at universities consume so much of it that most dormitories have an unofficial ‘brewmaster’ in charge of keeping the students supplied during exams. There are other neural enhancers that, strictly speaking, perform better but Psyinth is special. If you acquire a taste for it, I have better bottles in my own quarters,” she all purred. “You have to do something special to earn it though.”
“Eh, hem, um,” Zayd stammered for a moment. She wasn’t wrong about the ‘Psyinth’ being special. Already his senses seemed sharper and he felt like it was becoming easier to recall information and to remember new things, like his mind was a machine that had been operating for years and just got an injection of lubricant. “So, about Dark Energy?” he asked, attempting to bring the conversation back on course.
“Dark Energy is the bane of human space travel,” she explained, leaning back and rolling the bowl of liquor in her hand casually. “And it’s the lifeblood of all empowered species. To understand Dark Energy and how it shapes the universe, I need to explain a few things about ancient history. Let’s start with Sol, the star system in which humanity evolved,” she said, summoning a holographic map that displayed humanity’s origin star system with its eight planets, asteroid belt, innumerable dwarf planets, and a vast band of icy bodies that surrounded the system.
“Sol exists in a vast, low-energy bubble. For centuries, humanity was barely aware of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Primitive humans could observe the effects of Dark Matter and Dark Energy on the universe, but they couldn’t observe it directly. What humanity failed to realize is that they’re effectively blind to an energy that permeates the entire universe and exerts considerable pressure on reality as we understand it,” she explained. “For primitive humanity, however, it would be a long time before Dark Energy became relevant to their existence.”
“Are you suggesting that Dark Energy was relevant to aliens earlier in their development?” Zayd asked. It was relatively easy to understand what she was saying, but he wanted to make sure he correctly understood the things she wasn’t saying before he made assumptions that would only trip him up later on.
“You can say that,” Eirian said with a smile. “But you’re getting ahead. For now, let’s return to the bubble humanity developed their first interstellar colonies in.” With a swipe of her hand, the projection zoomed out to show several other star systems around Sol. “This is the local bubble around humanity’s home system. It can be considered a blessing and a curse for humanity to have evolved in this bubble. Without Dark Energy, it’s very difficult for sentient life to evolve. It’s also relatively easy to navigate hyperspace once you discover a method to pierce the barriers into higher dimensions. Growing up in this desolate wasteland let humanity establish several colonies even with high-speed sub-light colony vessels. Advances in cryonics allowed starship crews to complete journeys that took decades to reach distant star systems and to have a reasonable hope of returning home if founding a colony was impossible. For a thousand years, humanity slowly stumbled their way out from Sol to the edges of their bubble until finally, they bumped into something.”
“The Canopus Horde,” Zayd said. Growing up in a program designed to create exceptional mech pilots, there was little need to study ancient history, but there were some things that every child learned in school and humanity’s first and near-fatal encounter with a powerful alien race was one of them.
“Exactly,” the priestess said with a smile. “The natives of the Canopus Star Cluster were the first aliens humanity encountered that had evolved in an environment with a higher saturation of Dark Energy. The Canopus Horde was superior to early humanity in nearly every way. Their visual organs could see Dark Energy that humanity was blind to. Not only could they see it, but they could harness this extraordinary energy to power their bodies, their weapons, their starships. They were faster, stronger, more interconnected with each other than humanity could imagine.”
Stolen novel; please report.
“In school, we learned that we defeated the Canopus Horde because they lacked advanced tactical thinking and relied on overwhelming power to achieve victory,” Zayd said, trying to remember what he’d learned in his limited history classes long ago. “They still destroyed three-quarters of human colonized worlds before they could be stopped.”
“True,” Eirian acknowledged easily. “But the humans who survived were the best of humanity. Evolution demands periodic culling of the weak and the unworthy. The Canopus Horde proved to be an effective predator for primitive humanity but the war against the horde also provided the survivors with a wealth of technology to study that propelled human technological development forward by millenia. Still, humanity hasn’t adapted well to Dark Energy. It wasn’t until centuries after the war against the Canopus Horde that humanity managed to map the Mirzam Tunnel and even longer to build the first generation of Stellar Gates to navigate through it to the vast Vella Supershell. It’s ironic when you think about it. Instead of adapting to live in a region like the Mirzam tunnel that has a moderate concentration of Dark Energy, humanity treated it like a navigational hazard that they had to overcome on their way to an even larger desolate region,” she said with a dark laugh as she topped off her drink and poured more of the rich and intoxicating Psyinth for Zayd.
“So what you’re saying is that Dark Energy is a free-floating power source that can power not only weapons and starships but also organic life,” Zayd summarized. “But humanity evolved in a region without it so we’re largely incapable of harnessing it and we navigate to star systems that are like Sol that are in bubbles without much Dark Energy.”
“Exactly,” Eirian praised with a smile. “But not every human was content to live this way. You possess the faintest genetic link to the first branch of humanity to find a way to evolve themselves to a point that they could perceive Dark Energy. The Luminaries used a combination of selective breeding over dozens of generations along with targeted genetic manipulation and infusions of alien DNA from species that evolved in higher energy regions of the galaxy to achieve their breakthrough. Of course, they had enemies. Much of humanity feared that the Luminaries would gain tremendous power that outstripped the rest of humanity. Eventually, the Holy Luminary Kingdom fell to the combined forces of the Solarian Empire. The survivors fled to the Bay of Dorado where Dark Energy concentrations were too high for anyone but Luminary navigators to safely travel with the starships available at the time.”
“What happened after that?” Zayd asked, never having heard about the Luminaries or their persecution in any of the history classes he’d taken before. It made sense in a way. For the Luminaries, their destruction at the hands of the Solarian Empire had been a pivotal moment in their history. To the Solarian Empire, they were one of many failed subordinate states in its long history.
“A great deal happened after that,” the priestess answered. “The Luminaries met other races, they continued their efforts to evolve themselves forward and in doing so, they established the Stellar Imperium in the Carina Region. The concentration of Dark Energy in the Carina Region is, at a minimum, one thousand times greater than the concentration of Dark Energy in Sol or here in the Vella Supershell. There are some stellar clusters in the Carina Region where the concentration of Dark Energy is greater than that by one or two orders of magnitude. Such regions produce terrifying empowered lifeforms that some natives of the region worship as gods. We’re only safe from such beings because they have a different evolutionary weakness. Can you guess what it is?”
Zayd sipped the heady alcohol as he considered the world that the priestess had described. Humanity as he understood it had evolved in a way that wasn’t able to utilize Dark Energy and in fact, feared it. The more Eirian referred to the places where humanity had settled as ‘desolate’ though, the more Zayd wondered what it would be like for aliens who grew up in environments rich in Dark Energy would think of visiting places like humanity’s home system. Suddenly, his eyes widened as an idea struck him. “Fish! For powerful beings that evolve in places that are saturated with Dark Energy, their evolutionary weakness is that they depend on it. To come to a place like this would be like a fish being thrown on dry land. They couldn’t support their own life without the energy they depend on!”
“Exactly so,” Eirian responded with a wide smile. “The beings in those places may be powerful beyond belief, but they live in cages. The Stellar Imperium studies them but we’re very cautious about applying their genes to our own evolutionary path lest we find ourselves similarly shackled.”
“So, Fae have evolved to have a higher adaptation to Dark Energy and are able to use it to empower themselves and their technology,” Zayd said to bring the conversation back to his current problem. “And that means that I can’t use your weapons for my mission.”
“Not necessarily,” the priestess said with a shake of her head. “The Spear of Destiny is a research and exploration vessel. While I lack the equipment to give you a gradual genetic realignment to enhance your body’s compatibility with Dark Energy, the equipment here is still quite sophisticated. It’s sufficient for me to apply a more, let’s say ‘brute force,’ approach to modifying your body. The resultant modifications may be inelegant and could have a number of unexpected consequences if we can’t get you into a proper modification pod within a few months but, if we’re lucky, I can infuse enough Fae tissue into your body to allow you to have ten, even twenty times the capacity to store and absorb Dark Energy that you currently have. So, what do you think, Champion?”