Speaker 1: Hullo. I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. The alert came at the worst
possible time. Grand Admiral Sarath Khan was in the middle
of a formal dinner with three senators and the High
Commander of the Western Fleet when his personal communicator buzzed
against his wrist. He ignored it the first time, He
ignored it the second time. When it buzzed a third
time in less than a minute, he excused himself from
the table, stepped out on to the wide stone balcony
of the Imperial Palace and answered the voice in the
other end belonged to his night watch officer, a young
male named Coorvin, and the voice was shaking. That was
the first sign something was very wrong. Kauviin had been
working the night desk for eleven years. Sir ath Kahan
had never heard him shake before. Admiral Couvin said, we
have lost contact with Border Patrol Cruizer seven hundred ninety four,
thus known position the outer Veil sector. Final transmission came
in twelve minutes ago. Sir, you need to see what
they sent. Sath con stood in the balcony and looked
out over the lights of Ookara. The fir and world
of the Dominion Empire stretched out before him in every direction,
towers of white stone and blue glass reaching up into
the night sky, the glow of ten million lights reflecting
off low clouds, the distant hum of the city that
never truly slept. It was the most powerful planet in
fourteen thousand star systems. It had not been threatened in
six hundred years. Send it to my personal screen, he said,
I'll be there in twenty minutes. He was there in twelve.
The Imperial Fleet Command Center sat deep beneath the palace,
carved into the bedrock of the planet itself. It was
a vast circular room, filled with holographic displays, rows of
analysts at their stations, and the quiet, constant noise of
date to flowing in from every corner of the Dominion's territory.
Sareth Khan had spent more of his life in this
room than anywhere else. He knew every light on every panel.
He knew the difference between a normal alert and a
series one, just from the color of the indicators to night.
The indicators were color he had not seen in a
very long time, but deep solid red, not the flashing
red of a minor emergency, the steady red of something
that had already happened and could not be undone. Corvin
met him at the door and led him directly to
the central display without saying a word. The other annalists
at their stations require as too quiet. They were all
watching him. That was another bad sign. The image on
the central display was grainy and broken. It had clearly
been captured in a hurry, pulled from the board of
Cruz's external censor array in the last seconds before transmission
was cut off. Parts of it were blurred by static,
parts of it were simply missing, replaced by dark blocks
where the data had been corrupted, But enough of it
was there, so off Con looked at the image for
a long time without speaking. Nay. It was a ship,
that much was certain, But it was unlike any ship
he had ever seen in forty years of naval service.
It was enormous. The size comparison markers automatically generated by
the Census system showed it to be nearly twice the
length of a Dominion heavy dreadnought, which was itself the
largest class of vessel in the Imperial Fleet. But It
wasn't just the size that stopped him. It was the shape.
Every space far and civilization that dominion had ever encountered
built ships that were smooth, curved, aerodynamic in form, even
where aerodynamics meant nothing in the vacuum of space. It
was simply what intelligent minds tended toward. Flean lines, heligan shapes,
ships that looked as though they belonged among the stars.
This thing looked like it had been built to survive them.
It was angular and hard edged, all flat plates in
sharp corners. Its hull was dark, not painted dark, but dark,
the way old iron gets dark after it has been
through fire, scarred, burned in places marked with lines of
damage that had been repaired and then damaged again, and
repaired again so many times that the repairs themselves had
become part of the hull. Long deep grooves ran along
its sides, the kind of marks left by weapons that
had grazed it but not killed it. There were areas
where the plating had been replaced so many times that
the colors didn't match, creating a patchwork look that somehow
made it look more dangerous, not less. The ship was moving.
Even in the still image, the sense of data showed
velocity markers that made Sarath Khan's jaw titan. It was true,
wabbling at a speed that should have been impossible for
something that size, and it was heading inward toward populated space.
On the lower section of the hull, barely visible through
the damage in the age and the grime of what
looked like years in deep space, there were markings and
characters in some unknown skirt cut deep into the metal.
Has anyone been able to read that? Saaf Kon asked.
We sent it to the Zeno Linguistics division. As soon
as we received the transmission. Coven said, they're working on it. Now.
What destroyed the cruiser? Corven hesitated. We don't know that
it was destroy Sir. There was no explosion recorded, no
debris field detected. The transmission simply stopped. The ship went silent.
Sieroth Khan looked at the image again. What was the
cruiser's crew compliment two hundred forty, Sir? Nobody in the
room said anything. The Zeno Linguistics team worked through the night.
There were a small division, mostly academics who had been
folded into Imperial Intelligence because of the dominion. Occasionally encounter ruins
of dead civilizations during its expansion and needed someone to
make sense of what they found. They were used to
working on fragments of ancient texts, cove stones, mondetta chich
recovered from long dead ships. They were not used to
being woken at midnight and told to decipher something as
a matter of urgent military priority. But they worked, and
by the time the first pale light of dawn was
beginning to show above the Volcaros sky line, a scene
yelling was named the same made a discovery that made
her stop completely and simply stereot as screened for several
long seconds before she called her director. The script in
the wholl was not in any active database, as that
was expected, but it was an entirely unknown either. Dissat
had run it through every archive the Dominion possessed, including
the deep arcas where old forgotten data went to collect
test and she had found a match, a partial match
three characters out of appeared to be a longer sequence.
The match came from a report filed three hundred twelve
years ago by a long range exploration probe that had
been sent into a region of space far beyond the
Dominion's borders. A tiny satellite galaxy orbiting on the edge
of the larger galactic structure that the Dominion called home.
The probe had detected unusual energy sigatures and had captured
images of what appeared to be debris from some kind
of conflict. Among the debris were fragments of help plating.
The probe had photographed the fragments before being destroyed by
a piece of fast moving wreckage. The images had been filed, archived,
and entirely forgotten about for three centuries. The characters on
those ancient hull fragments matched three of the characters and
the ship in the border censor image. Dissat's hands were
not quite steady when she typed up her report. She
crossed reference the match three times before she included it.
She was a careful person by nature, and she didn't
want to cause a panic over a coincidence. But it
was to coincidence. She was sure of that the script
was too specific, too consistent. This was the same written language.
Whatever had been in that satellite galaxy three hundred years ago,
and whatever was now moving through the outer veil at
an impossible speed came from the same place. She flagged
the single segment of texts that her translation algorithms had
been able to partially process four characters one partial word
why U NSS. She didn't know what it meant, Her
algorithms didn't know what it meant, but it was a
name or part of one. And now we had a face,
a massive, scarred, fast moving face that had just silenced
a two hundred forty person border patrol cruiser without leaving
a debris field. She sent her report to the Admiral's
office and went to make herself a cup of something hot,
because she suspected it was going to be a very
long day. Seeof Khan read the report twice, then he
called in his senior staff. By mid morning, the entire
upper command of the Imperial Fleet was gathered in the
main briefing room beneath the palace. Maps covered every wall.
The grainy image of the unknown vessel was displayed at
the front of the room, enlarged and enhanced as much
as the original date allowed. It didn't look any less
alarming at a larger size. Siov con stood at the
head of the table and went through everything they knew,
which was not much. An own vessel, my unknown origin
satellite galaxy possibly or something connected to one speed and
size beyond current Dominion capability border cruise of silence without
debris moving toward populated space. Bate of travel suggested it
would reach the first inhabited system in the Veil Corridor
approximately three days. Recommendations, he said the room gave him several.
They ranged from immediate diplomatic contact proposed by zapply one person,
a young intelligence officer named Veal, who every one else
in the room visibly disagreed with, to full military interception
by the largest force they could assemble an available time.
The military option one. It wasn't even close. Sierov Khan
authorized the deployment of Battle Group Paris forty warships, including
six heavy cruisers, twelve destroyer class vessels, and the rest
a mix of combat frigates and support craft. It was
a serious force. It had pacified rebellious systems before it out,
destroyed pirate fleets, and broken the naves of civilizations that
had made the mistake of challenging the Dominion. Forty ships
against one, the mass seemed reasonable. The mass seemed, in
fact overwhelmingly in the Dominion's favor. Fleet Admiral Harris himself
took command of the group. He was a hard man,
experienced and decorated, and he had the confidence of some
one who had never lost a major engagement. He reviewed
the censor image of the unknown vessel with the calm
assessment of a professional, and concluded that while the ship
was large, large ships heard weaknesses targeting systems, power distribution nodes,
engine sections. Every ship had them. His weapons officers would
find them. He departed with de Nires, his forty ships
foreman up around his flagship in perfect order, the pride
of the Imperial Fleet cutting for space toward the outer Veil.
The Dominion had a very long history, six thousand years
of recorded expansion, conquests, diplomacy, and war. In that time,
it had encountered forty three distinct space faring civilizations. Of those,
thirty one had been absorbed into the Empire, either the
Negotiation or Force. Nine had been destroyed when they proved
too difficult to absorb and too dangerous to leave alone.
Free currently existed in a state of uneasy truce al
on the Dominion's borders, kept in check by the threat
of the Imperial Fleet. Not one of those forty three
civilizations had ever made the dominion afraid, uncomfortable, sometimes cautious occasionally,
but not a frayed. The dominion was simply too large,
too old, and too powerful to be afraid of anything
it had yet encountered. That was about to change. Three
days after Battle Group Harrows departed for Karr, the long
range communication network registered a brief burst of transmission from
the Veil corridor. It lasted less than four seconds. It
was heavily fragmented. The analysts worked on it for an
hour before they could reconstruct enough of it to understand
what it contained. It was not a battle report from
Admiral Harrows. It was not a status update or a
tactical assessment. It was a distress beacon, a single automated
emergency signal of the type that activated when a ship's
main systems were destroyed but its emergency corps was still functioning,
just one beacon out of forty ships. SIERRAF. Khan was
in his office when they told him. Well. He did
not react visibly. He had trained himself over decades not
to react visibly to bad news. Because a grand admiral
who looked afraid made everyone else afraid, and afraid people
made bad decisions. He sat very still and looked at
the report on his desk and breathed slowly and said
nothing for almost a full minute. Then he asked for
the ze Ino Linguistics report again, the one with the
four character fragment hunsk. He read it again, slowly, as
though there was something in it he had missed the
first two times. There was. It was the same report,
four characters, no meaning, a connection to a satellite galaxy
three centuries old, a ship that had just eaten forty
warships and kept moving. He set the report down. He
looked at the map on his wall, the full extent
of the Dominion Empire fourteen thousand SAW systems, the greatest
power this galaxy had ever seen. Then he looked at
the small marker on the map that showed the last
known position of the unknown vessel, still moving, still heading inward.
He thought about something that the young intelligence officer Fell
had said in the briefing, the one every one had dismissed.
What if they are not here to conquer? What if
they're here for something else? Entirely nobody had answered the question.
Nobody had thought it was worth answering. Wazarathconne was beginning
to think it might have been the most important question
in the room. He called for his senior staff again.
When they filed and saw his face. The room and
very quiet, very fast, because this time, for the first
time in the memory of any one present, the Grand
Admiral of the Imperial Fleet looked like a man who
was not entirely sure what to do next. Outside, above
the palace, above the towers and the lights of Elcara,
the sky was clear and full of stars. Somewhere, out
beyond the stars, something old and scarred and very far
from home was still moving, still heading inward, still as
far as anyone knew, completely unchallenged. And in the wreckage
of forty Imperial warships, somewhere in the dock of the
Outer Ale, a single automated beacon was still blinking, one beacon,
one survivor, and nobody yet knew what they had seen.
Venture had been a censor officer for three years. She
was twenty two years old. She had joined the Imperial
Fleet because she was good at numbers, and her father
had served, and she wanted to see more of the
galaxy than the small agricultural world she had grown up on.
She had expected patrol routes, border surveys, maybe some minor
piracy suppression if she was unlucky. She had not expected this.
She was floating in an escape pod rophy the size
of a large closet. The potted here for seventy two rows,
water for forty eight, and the single emergency transmitted that
she had already activated. Through the pods one small porthole,
she could see the debris field that had approximately four
hours of gope in forty of the most powerful warships
in the Dominion Empire. She was trying very hard not
to look at all of it. She was not entirely succeeding.
The unknown ship was still out there. She could see
it through the porthole when it passed within visual range,
A dark angular shape moving slowly, now, almost carefully, you
among the wreckage. It was not running. It had no
reason to run. It had destroyed the entire battle group
in less than twenty minutes, and it was simply drifting,
as if it was taking stock of what had happened
or looking for something. Ventha had her recording equipment running.
She had activated at the moment the battle started. Because
she was a censor officer and Recording things was what
she did, and also because some part of her had
understood very quickly that what was happening was something that
needed to be recorded. Even if nobody ever to reave
the pot, even if they ran out before anyone found her,
the record needed to exist. So she watched, and she recorded,
and she tried to understand what she was seeing. The battle,
if it could be called, that, had not started the
way battles usually started. Battle Group Powers had found the
unknown vessel Egos exactly where the projection said it would be,
crossing the midpoint of the Veil corridor at a steady pace.
The ship had been easy to detect. It wasn't hiding,
It wasn't even trying to hide. It was broadcasting something,
a signal on multiple frequencies, repeating on a regular cycle,
the same pattern, over and over. The fleet's communication analyst
hadn't been able to decode it in the time available,
but the pattern was clearly deliberate. It was clearly meant
to be heard. Admiral Harrows had been unmoved by the signal.
He had disorders, and his orders were to stop the
vessel before it reached and inhabited space. He had arranged
his forty ships in a standard intercept formation, a wide
net of warships designed to cut off any possible direction
of his gape, and had charged his weapons in Venture's
station on one of the cruisers. She had watched an
unknown vessel on her census screen and noted something that
she hadn't purported because there had been no time, and
also because she hadn't been sure what it meant. The
unknown vessel had detected them almost immediately. Its course had
not changed, its speed had not changed, and its broadcast
signal that repeating unknown pattern on multiple frequencies had not
changed either. It just kept broadcasting right up until the
moment Admiral Harrows gave the order to fire. The first
salvo from forty Dominion warships was by any objective measure, tremendous.
Plasmo lancers from the heavy cruisers hit the target with
enough energy to mount a small moon mass. Driver rounds
from the destroyer clasp punch space at a fraction of
the speed of light. Graviten bombs, the Dominion's most powerful
conventional weapon, detonated in a spread pattern designed to shatter
hull integrity across the entire length of the target vessel,
all of it hit. Then the head washed her censors
and confirmed it every single weapon in that first salvo
had connected with the unknown ship. The unknown ship had
kept moving, not unchanged. Her senses had registered impacts, heat blooms,
stressed readings along the hull. The weapons had done something,
but the ship had not slowed, It had not broken apart.
It had not done any of the things that ships
did when forty warships hit them all at once. There
had been a pause of approximately eleven seconds after the
first salvo. During those eleven seconds that the bro broadcast
signal had stopped, then the unknown ship had responded. Vanda
did not have complete footage of what happened next because
her recording equipment had been partially damaged when the ship
she was on took its first hit, but she had enough.
She had the sense of data, which told its own
story with coal complete numbers. She had partial visual from
the external cameras before they went dark. She had audio
of the bridge crew until the moment the bridge was hit,
which the unknown ship had not fired, and a widespread
the way the Dominion fleet had it had not tried
to hit everything at once. It had picked targets one
at a time with a precision that was almost uncomfortable
to watch on the censor display. Heavy cruisers first, the
most powerful ships in the formation, the ones that posed
the greatest threat. Then the destroyer class, then the frigus
methodical efficient. Not angry, not frantic, not the firing pattern
of a crew panikin under attack. It was the firing
pattern of a crew doing a job. The Dominion battle
group had lasted nineteen minutes and forty seconds when the
last Dominion ship went dark. The unknown vessel had stopped
firing immediately, not gradually, not winding down immediately, like turning
off a lett switch. The gun simply stopped, and the
ship continued moving at the same steady piece it had
maintained throughout, and the broadcast signal came back on the
same signal, the same repeating pattern, you know, like nothing
had happened. Venture was watching through her porthole when the
unknown ship came close enough that she could see its
tall details without the aid of instruments. She pressed herself
against the porthole glass like a child looking into a window, Because,
even terrified and alone and very possibly about to die,
she was a censor officer, and she couldn't help herself.
The ship was even bigger up close than the sense
of readings had suggested. It filled most of her field
of view. She could see the repair work she had
noted in the pre bassal briefing images, the mismatched hul plaits,
the old damage that had been patched over and then
damaged again. There were places in the hull where she
could count at least four distinct lays of her pair work,
each one overlap in the last. The ship had been
true things, many things, over a long time, and every
time it had been damaged, some one had fixed it
and send it back out. She was trying to figure
out the scale of one of the larger repair patches.
It looked like it might be older than the Dominion's
current dynasty, when something happened that made her breath catch completely.
A port opened in the side of the ship, not
a weapons port, something else, and a voice came out
of it, not through the emergency beacons basic receiver, through
the beacon's full communication system, which meant the ship had
somehow identified the beacon's frequency and targeted it specifically. The
voice was speaking in an unknown language. It was a
recorded message. She realized the same few seconds of speech
repeating on the cycle the same way the broadcast signal
had been repeating a different message, though this one was
specifically directed at her powd's frequency. They knew she was there. Then,
after the unknown language message had repeated three times, something
else came through a face on the tiny screen of
her emergency communicator. A face appeared. She almost dropped the communicator.
It was unlike any face she had ever seen. The
being had two eyes, forward facing in a flat face
with a protruding no structure, and a white mouth. The
skin was a pale brown color, and the face had
lined in it, ones around the eyes and mouth, and
the kind of lines that came from age and tiredness
and spending a long time in places that were not
kind to you. The hair, which grew directly from the
top of the head and away that Venture found deeply strange,
was gray and cut short. The being looked directly at
the camera. Its expression was hard to read. Venture had
spent three years learning to read dominion faces, and alien
facial expressions were not something she had trained for. But
she spent a long time looking at that face. Afterward,
thinking about what she had seen later, she would decide
that the expression was tired and sad and careful, the
expression of some one who was working very hard to
make sure the next thing they did was the right thing.
The being spoke the words were unknown, but then the
message shifted a different tone, a more mechanical quality, and
what came through was not words, but something else, a
translation attempt wolf It clearly assembled from the fragments of dominion,
language captured from the border cruiser and the battle group communications,
broken and in complete, but structured with an obvious, deliberate effort.
We speak no morphight, we are far from a translatable.
We are lost, We want talk, we won't go home.
In the face again the same tired, careful expression, and
then one more word alone, clearly considered the most important
thing to convey. Please. The transmission ended to Vince. She
sat in the dock of her escape pod, surrounded by
the debris of forty warships, and stared at the blank
screen of her communicator for a very long time. Then
she did her job. She checked her recording equipment. She
confirmed that everything, every second of the battle, every sense
of reading, every piece of footage she had been captured
and was intact. She packaged the entire record into the
Haighs priority transmission form at the emergency Beacon could produce.
She added her own voice record, speaking quickly and precisely,
describing what she had seen in the ordered, factual way
that since our officer reported data. She included the face,
she included the translated message, She included a word at
the end. Then she transmitted everything sheered back to aar Vokaro,
knowing it would take time to arrive, knowing she might
not be alied to know if any one received it
shack and hoping very hard that whoever eventually read her
report would pay attention to all of it, not just
the part about forty destroyed warships, all of it. Inside
the Unscardamantine Resolve, the mood was not celebratory. Captain Allaravus
stood at the central command console of the bridge and
looked at the damage report on her screen. Without any
visible expression around her, the crew moved with the quiet
efficiency of people who had been drew worse and knew
how to keep working when things were bad. The bridge
of the Resolve was a practical space. Everything functional, nothing decorative,
every surface designed to be useful rather than impressive. It
looked like what it was, the working environment of a
ship that had been deployed for a very long time.
Breach and section seven is sealed, said the damage control
officer to her left. One how integrity at eighty three
percent overall, reacted to his showing some fluctuation, but with
an acceptable range. We lost three external censor arrays in
the port side, minor casualties in the engineering section, nothing
life threatening vasil and without interrupting. When the report was finished,
she nodded. Once, get me a full list of what
we expended, she said, and Massy runs Archer missiles everything.
I want the exact count. Yes, come captain. She turned
to her communications officer. The pod did we get a response?
No verbal response, but it still transmitting its beacon, so
whoever is in there is still alive. We received confirmation
that our message was received. The beacon's frequency changed slightly
after our transmission, which means the occupant adjusted it manually.
They heard us. Voss nodded again. She walked to the
side of the bridgewood. Observation windows gave a view of
the space outside where the debris field was visible pieces
of the ships they had just destroyed, tumbling slowly in
the dark. She stood there for a moment and looked
at it. Her senior staff watched her and said nothing.
They knew her well enough to give her this moment.
She had not wanted to fight. She had broadcast on
every frequency they had managed to identify from the intercepted
communications of the incoming fleet. She broadcast for the entire
time it took the fleet to approach, and she had
kept broadcasting right up until the moment the first weapons hit.
She had given them every chance she could. She had
done what she always did, everything possible to avoid the fight,
before accepting that the fight was avoidable. But an avoidable
was still unavoidable. And here they were. She turned back
to the bridge navigator. Where are we? The navigator, a
young man named Obi, who had been running calculations almost
continuously for two years, pulled up the stale map, the
best current estimate. Captain, approximately two point three million light
years from home, were in a separate galaxy from ires,
smaller than the Milky Way, but old, very old. He paused,
the slip space anomaly that brought us here, isn't something
I can reproduce. I've been looking for a way back
for twenty two months. I don't have one yet. Are
you still looking? Every day? Captain could keep looking. She
moved back to the center of the bridge. Senior staff
meeting in ten minutes. We need to talk about where
we go from here. Someone in this galaxy has to
be willing to sit down and talk. We just have
to find them. She said it simply as a fact,
the way she said most things, not hopefully, not dramatically,
just as a conclusion she had reached and was now
working from her first officer, a tall man named Rico,
who had served with her for eleven years, fell into
step beside her as she moved toward the briefing room.
They outnumbered as forty to one, he said quietly. They did,
she agreed, and they still lost. Yes, Ricca was quiet
for a moment. Do you think they'll send more? Voss
glanced at him. I think they'll send a lot more,
she said, which is why we need to be talking
to someone with authority before the next fleet arrives. She
pushed open the door to the briefing room because I
genuinely do not want to do that again. She sat
down at the head of the table and pulled up
the star charts on the room's display. Outside and in
the dock of the veil corridor, the debris continued to drift,
and in a small pot somewhere in that debrie, a
young censor officer with shaking hands, was sending everything she
had seen back to the most powerful and in the galaxy.
Sierraf Kam would receive that report in approximately eightyen narrows.
He would read it four times, and a word at
the end, the single translated word, would stay with him
longer than anything else in it. Fleas not a fret,
not a declaration, not the word of a conquirer, just
a very tired crew a very long way from home,
asking for a chance to talk. He just wasn't sure
yet if the Empire was going to give it to them.
The Imperial Senate of the Dominion had not seen a
session like this in four hundred years. The chamber itself
was built to impress that was the honest truth of it,
though no one in official Dominion history had ever written
it dan that way. The ceiling rose so high above
the floor that the upper galleries were sometimes lost in
natural mist. On humid days. The seats curved in a
great dock around the central speaking floor, teared so that
every senator could see every other senator, and the speaker
standing at the center could see all of them. The
walls were carved from white stone that had been quarried
on a moon that no longer existed, destroyed long ago
in a weapons test. The whole room said, in a
language of architecture that the people who built this and
sad in these chairs with the most powerful beings in
a known universe, and had been for a very long
time to date. Those people looked frightened, not all of them.
Fair expressed itself differently in different individuals. And there were
senators carved stone seats who showed their fear of anger,
and senators who assured it as denial, and senators who
didn't show it at all, but sat very still and
very pale, and contributed nothing. But the fear was there.
ADVENTUREUS report had been classified at the highest level, but
in the Dominion Empire, as in every large political structure
that had ever existed anywhere, classified information had a way
of becoming widely known, very quickly among the people who mattered.
Forty worships gone in twenty minutes. The number moved through
the chamber like a cold wind. People whispered it to
each other. They erode it on data slates and passed
those slates down the rows. They said out loud, in
tones ranging from disbelief to outrage, to something quieter and
more honest, something closer to genuine fear of what it meant.
Brand Admiral sath constood at the speaker's position in the
center of the fort and delivered his report with the
same steady voice he always used. He gave the facts
with that embellishment. He presented the sensitate of the frightenments
of translated communicatation ventures testimony. He showed the image of
their known vessel, enlarged when enhanced, displayed in the great
screen behind him, so that every senator in the chamber
cosided and detailed the scoured hold them as matched plate
in the mockings. They still could not folly translate. He
answered questions for two hours. Questions were mostly the kind
that powerful people ask when they are afraid, in trying
to sound like the aunt How quickly can we replace
the losses? How many ships can we mobilize in the
next week. What are our largest weapons and have we
considered using them? He answered all of them honestly. Then
he stood in the silence that followed and waited to
see if anyone was going to ask the question he
actually thought mattered. Senator alone at Dar asked it. Laura
was sixty three years old and had been in the
Senate for thirty one of those years. She was thin,
with sharp eyes, in the kind of face that had
been handsome once and was now interesting instead, angula, watchful,
deeply lined. She dressed simply for a senator, always in
plain dark cloth, no ceremonial decorations except the small silver
paint of her home district that she wore on her
left shoulder. She was not popular in the Senate. She was, however,
it respected, which was different and in many ways more useful.
She had read Venture's report twice before the session began,
not just the tactical summary that had been prepared for
the senators, a full report, including the personal observations and
including the translated message, including the description of the face
in the screen. She had read all of it, and
she had thought about it carefully, and then she had
come to the Senate chamber with something specific to say.
She waited and till the questions about fleet strength and
weapons had exhausted themselves. She waited until the room had
settled into the kind of silence that comes after a
lot of noise. Ushered to the silence where people were
beginning to realize that shouting hadn't solved anything. Then she
requested the speaking floor and walked down to the center
of the chamber and stood where Sarath Khan had stood.
I want to talk about the signal, she said. The
room shifted. A few senators look confused. She kept going
before Admiral Harris opened fire. The unknown vessel was broadcasting
all multiple frequencies. Our own analysts confirmed this. The broadcast
was repeating on a regular cycle, clearly deliberate, clearly designed
to be received. We could not translate it at the time,
but given what we have now learned about the fragments
of the civilization's language, Ourseno linguistics team has been working
on it. She paused. Admiral Saath Khan, has that translation
been completed? Saath Kah, standing to one side of the foe,
now nodded slowly. It was completed this morning. He said,
Hanau was planning to include it in the supplementary report.
What does it say? Another pause? Sarath Kahan looked at
the chamber for a moment, all those watching faces, and
then he said it plainly. It says approximately, we are
a vessel from a distant civilization. We have traveled a
great distance and afar from home. We have no hostile intent.
We would like to communicate peacefully. Please respond. The chamber
was very quiet, Please respond, Lowayne repeated. May she let
it sit in the air for a moment. They were
asking to talk. Therefore we fired a single shot. They
were asking to talk. In fact, they were asking to
talk the entire time Admiral Harris was arranging his battle formation.
They kept asking ride up until the moment our weapons
hit them. She looked round the chamber slowly, and then
only then beforet that they destroyed forty ships. Someone shouted
from the upper gallery. Lawne didn't look up toward the voice. Yes,
she said, after we shot at them first. After this spent,
according to the sense of data, approximately forty minutes broadcasting
a request for peaceful communication that we chose to ignore.
I am not saying they are not dangerous. They clearly are.
I am saying that when you look at the secrets
of event honestley, which I am asking this chamber to do,
the picture looks somewhat different than a simple act of regression.
The murmuring in the chamber grew louder. She raised her
voice lightly. I don't want to ask this body a question,
A serious one, not about military strength of fleet numbers,
A different kind of question. She moved to the displaced
green and brought up the image of the Adamantine resolve,
the battered hull, the scars, the mis snatched plate in
look at the ship, look at it carefully. Our analyst
estimated it is been traveling for a significant period. The
condition of the hull, the number of repair cycles, a
type of damage visible. Oh No, All of the points
to a vessel that has been in deep space for
an extremely long time, possibly years. She turned back to
the chamber. This is not a scouting vessel ahead of
an invision fleet. This is not a warship. Position at
the edge of our territory is a show strength. This
is a ship that is lost. We know this because
they said so in broken, barely translated words to the
occupant of an escape pot floating in the wreckage of
forty of our vessels. They said, we are lost. Oh,
we want to go home. Please. The silence that followed
was different from the silence before, heavier, more thoughtful, and
if I'm wrong, the rain said, more quietly. Now, and
this is the advanced force of some vast armada than
destroying this ship accomplishes nothing because the armad knows where
we are now. They know because this ship was here
and fought us and was never had from again. The
message that sends is not the dominion is too powerful
to attack. The message is the dominion destroys everything it
encounters without asking questions First, she paused, if there is
a civilization behind this vessel, one capable of building and
deploying something like it, do we want them coming here
with war in mind? What would we prefer to know
they came here once and left peacefully. She stepped back
from the display Awana I am asking for a vote
to suspend the military response and attempt formal communication with
the unknown vessel. The vote failed, not by a wide margin,
but it failed forty one senators to thirty seven with
nine abstentions. The chamber's fear was simply greater than its caution.
Too many senators thought like soldiers rather than diplomats, and
too many of those who might averted differently were too
afraid of the emperor to do it. An Emperor of
Othono's room and four had not come to the Senate
session in person. He was ninety four years old and
rarely left inner palace any more. But his voice had
been prison for oath in the messages delivered to key
senators before the session, in the whispered conversations in the corridors,
in the simple fact that every one in the room
knew what he wanted. He wanted the vessel destroyed. He
wanted the threat eliminated. He was not a man who
had maintained power for thirty years by accommodating things he
didn't understand, and a ship that had killed forty of
his worships was very high on the list of things
he intended not to accommodate. Three full battle groups were authorized,
three hundred ships drawn from multiple sectors, converging on the
Veil Corridor, the largest single military deployment the Dominion had
made in two centuries. Lawen warped out of the chamber
after the vert with Senator Vasho, the young intelligence officer
who had attended the session as an observer, at her side.
They walked in silence for a moment through the wide
stone corridor outside the chamber doors. They're making a mistake,
Velshi said, yes, Lauren agreed. What do we do? Lauren
looked at him sideways. He was young, twenty six maybe
twenty seven, smart, careful as to the kind of person.
The Intelligence Service attracted people who were good at looking
at information and join honest conclusions, even when the honest
conclusion was uncomfortable. We wait, she said, and we make
sure that when the mistake becomes obvious to everyone else,
we're ready with an alternative. Felsha was quiet for a moment.
Do you think the vessel will arrive? Three hundred ships?
Lauren thought about the image of the unknown ship, the scars,
the repairs, the number of times it had clearly been
through something terrible and come out the other side still moving.
She thought about the message VN that had sent, the
tired face and the screen, the broken translated words, the
single word at the end. I think, she said, carefully,
that whatever is on that ship has survived things we
cannot imagine. I think it survived getting here somehow, which
by our own navigator's assessment, should be impossible. I think
it survived forty of our warships, She paused. Whether it
can survive three hundred. I genuinely don't know. But I
know that even if it can't, even if we destroy it,
we will have gained nothing. Only made the situation worse.
They reached the end of the corridor below the palace windows.
Volkara went about its business, millions of lives flowing through
their daily rhythms, completely unaware of what was being decided
above them. The Emperor is afraid, Velshis said, MA, of
course he is, Lauren said, he has been afraid for
thirty years. Fear is how he governs. The problem is
that FIA is a very pro strategy for this particular situation.
She looked out the window at the city. Find me
everything you can about the occupant of that escape pot.
The censor officer, Belcher Velscha looked at her. Why because
she saw the face on the screen, Lawn said, And
she included a personal autovation in her report that nobody
else seems to have noticed. And because everyone was too
busy counting destroyed warships. She turned away from the window.
She said, the being Luksa, not aggressive, not triumphants, sad,
and then it set Please she met Velsha's eyes. I
want to talk to her before the three hundred ships
arrive at the veil. I want to know exactly what
she saw. Meanwhile, three hundred warships were already moving. Fleet
Emerald Drafha commanded the combined battle group from his flagship,
the Velchar's Judgment and the largest worship in the Imperial Fleet.
It was nearly kilometer long and carried weapons at couldkrack
a mon. Draffor had commanded it for eight years, and
in those eight years it had never fired an anger,
because nothing had ever required it to. He was a
careful man, methodical. He had read the report Group houses
destruction three times, and he had spent considerable time studying
every piece of data available in their own vessel's speed,
its weapons, with its apparent Holse strength, the way it
had selected targets during the engagement. He respected what he
was looking at. He did not underestimate it. But three
hundred ships was not fought ships, and Daffoa was not
the kind of commander who who made the same mistake twice, or,
in his case, made the same mistake that some one
else had already made. Once his orders were clear, find
the vessel, destroy it, but he sat at his command
station as his fleet moved through space and thought about
the one detail that had bothered him since he first
read the engagement report, the way the unknown ship could
stopped firing the moment the last dominion warship went dark
immediately like a switch. A ship fighting for survival didn't
stop like that. A ship fighting for survival kept firing
until it was certain every threat was gone. A ship
on an attack run didn't stop like that ear a
ship on an attack run pressed its advantage. A ship
that didn't want to fight stop exactly like that. He
had not included this observation in any of his reports.
He was a fleet admiral. His job was to follow
his orders, not to analyze the psychology of alien vessels,
and his orders were very clear. He looked at the
star maps showing the veil corridor and the last known
position of the unknown ship three days a current speed.
He told himself he was ready for whatever he would find.
He almost believed it. The Adamantine resolved detected the incoming
fleet six hours before it arrived. That was the advantage
of being alone in a relatively quiet region of spaces
censes that had been built to scan across hundreds of
millions of kilometers. There was no debris left from the
previous battle. The results crew had spent the days since
the engagement during what they always did after a fight,
which was clean up, repair what could be repaired, and
take stock of we things stood. The censor arrays in
the port side had been replaced with backup punits from storage.
The breach in section seven had been sealed properly, Reactive
two had been tuned back into stable operation. The ship
was not at full strength, but it was functional and
its censors were very, very good. When the first long
range contact appeared on the edge of the detection range,
the watch officer noted it without alarm and began the
standard process of characterizing the contact size, speed, heading, number
of individual signatures. Three minutes later, when the characterization was complete,
she called the captain. False arrived on the bridge already dressed.
She had a habit of sleeping in her uniform when
the ship was in any kind of uncertain situation, which
meant she had been sleeping in her uniform almost continuously
for two years. She came to the census station. He
looked at the display and studded it for a while
without speaking. The contacts were still far out, but the
numbers were clear enough. The computer kept updating the count
as more signatures resolved out of background noise. It was
past three hundred and still going up. All senior staff
to the bridge far said nah. They gathered within five minutes.
Boss waited until they were all present and then turned
to face them. And these were people she had served
with for years, in some cases more than a decade.
She trusted them completely. They trusted her. That trust had
been built over a long time and for a lot
of difficult situations, and it was part of why the
results crew functioned the way they did, quietly, efficiently, without panic,
even when panic was entirely reasonable. This was a moment
when panic was entirely reasonable. She told them what the
censor showed, so she told them they estimated arrival time.
She told them the size of a force. She watched
their faces as she spoke and saw what she expected,
not panic, but a tightening, a stillness, the look of
people doing rapid calculations and not finding comfortable answers. Then
she told them what she intended to do about it.
There was a silence after she finished her First officer
Rickou spoke, first, you want a whole position, yes, and
powered down weapons, not entirely stand by only, but yes,
e essentially against three hundred chips against three hundred ships.
Another silence. Rica looked at the censor display, then back
at her. He had a quality she valued in a
first officer, he thought before he argued, and when he argued,
he did it because he had a real point, not
because he was afraid. We have theme c rounds and
missiles for maybe one more engagement at the scale of
the last one, he said. Maybe after that were down
to point defense, a maneuvering. I know. So if this
doesn't work, If this doesn't work, fight, she said, And
we probably lose. But we've known for a while that
going home wasn't going to be easy. Dying in a
fight with three hundred alien worships is not outside the
range of what I considered when we accepted this posting.
She looked around at all of them. What I'm not
willing to do is start a fight when I don't
have to. We tried talking before, they didn't let us.
We're going to try again, she paused. Any objections, there
were none. There was some unhappiness in the room, but
nobody objected. They were professionals, and she was their captain.
And more than that, they knew she was right. Every
one of them had been thinking the same things she had,
that the last fight had not been what any of
them wanted, and that doing it again on a scale
seven times larger would be something a lot of them
might not walk away from. Honey, good Man, she said, Oh,
but what's your best current translation database? The navigator, who
had been quietly the second busiest person in the ship
for two years after vas herself, pulled up a screen.
We recovered a significant amount of communication data from the
last engagement. My language algorithms have been running continuously. I
can now produce rough but functional translations in their primary
language and receive their transmissions with about sixty percent comprehension accuracy.
He paused, It's not perfect, but it's a real conversation,
not just fragments. Voss looked at him for a moment. God,
she said again, and meant itt more this time, prepare
a broadcast. I'll wight it. We'll start transmitting the moment
they're within communication range. The broadcast went up four iours later,
when the first contacts were close enough for real time communication.
It was simple. Voss had written it herself, with Olbey's
help on the translation, and she had gone through six
drafts before she was satisfied. She wanted it to be
clear without being weak, honest without being frightening. She wanted
who ever received it to understand exactly what they were
dealing with, Not a vessel that was begging for mercy,
and not a vessel that was threatening them, but a
vessel that was making a reasonable choice. In explaining why,
it's aid, this is the ennsk Adamantine resolve. We know
you are coming. We have detected your fleet. We are
not running, we are not preparing to fire. We have
powered our weapons to minimum stand by level only. We
are holding our position. We came to this region by accident.
We are far from our home, farther than we can
easily explain, and we have been searching for a way
back for nearly two years. We have no territory here,
We have no claim here. We want nothing for me
except the chance to speak and, if possible, your help
in finding our way home. We fought the last fleet
because they fired on us first, after we had spent
forty minutes asking to communicate peacefully. We did not enjoy it.
We do not want to fight again. We are one ship,
one crew. We have people here who want to go
home to their families. We are waiting. Please talk to us.
She recorded it in her own voice itcher, and Obey
ran it through the translation software so it played in
the Dominion language. Then they broadcasted on every frequency they had,
repeating on a ten minute cycle, and they held their
position and waited. The ship sat still in space. The
crew went to their stations and maintained readness without engaging
weapons locks. In the mess hall, people ate quietly and
spoke low voices. In engineering, the team ran continuous checks
on the reactor, only making sure everything was as stable
as possible. In a small medical bay, the ship's stopped
to inventory supplies with the calm efficiency of someone who
was preparing for possibilities they were choosing not to name out.
Lad In the navigation room, Obe sat at his station
and ran calculations that he had been running for twenty
two months. He ran them because the captain had told
him to keep looking, and he was the kind of
person who did what he was told when the person
telling him had earned his trust completely. He ran them
also because the alternative, accepting that they would never find
a way home, was not something he was prepared to accept.
Not yet, maybe not ever. On the bridge force sat
in her command chair and drank coffee and watched the
contacts on her sensor display move closer. Fleet Admiral Draft
four received the broadcast when his fleet was still two
ius out. He was at his command station when it
came through. Translated him perfect in places, but clear enough
in its meaning. He listened to it twice. Then he
sat very still for a moment, which was something his
bridge crew recognized as the admiral doing serious thinking and
no k not to interrupt. He pulled up the date
on the battle Group Harris engagement. He had read it
many times before, but he looked at the specific timeline again,
the broadcast that had been going out before the fight,
to the forty minutes of attempted communication that Harris had
chosen to ignore, the way the firing had sopped immediately
when the last dominion ship was disabled. He put that
alongside the censor reading now coming in from the resolves
current position, stationary weapons on minimum standby, exactly as the
broadcast claimed. A ship that was preparing to fight three
hundred vessels did not power down its weapons. It charged
everything it had en tried to pick a most advantageous
moment to strike It definitely did not sit still and
broadcast its position and asked to talk. He called his
senior staff to the briefing room, which was unusual because
senior staff briefings were typically held before engagements, not two
IROs up from them. He showed them the broadcasts. He
showed them the sense of readings. He asked for assessments.
The assessments were mixed. His weapons officer voted was a trick,
a way of buying time, perhaps or throwing the feed
into a specific formation. His intelligence officer thought the broadcast
was genuine, but that it didn't matter because their orders
were clear. His second in command, a veteran named Korrath,
said nothing for a long time and then said, Admiral,
we have three hundred ships and they have won. If
this is a trick, we have more than enough strength
to handle whatever they do. If it's not a trick
on our end, we fire anyway, we will have destroyed
a vessel that was asking to talk after they already
asked to talk once before, and we send forty ships
to shoot at them instead of answering. Cores paused. I'm
not sure which of those possibilities concerns me more. Draftford
dismissed the briefing and went back to his station. The
fleet arrived at the Resolves position and spread out in
a vast encircle information three hundred warships forming a complete
sphere around a single human vessel. On every weapon system,
charged every target, and computer locked and waiting. It was
no overwhelming display of force. It was, by any military measurement,
an arrangement of power that should have ended any thought
of resistance before it began. The Adamantine Resolved sat in
the center of the sphere and did nothing. It didn't move,
it didn't charge weapons, It continued broadcasting its message on repeat,
and it waited. Draffer looked at it on his main
display for a long time. One he thought about his orders.
They were very clear. Find the vessel, destroy it. He
thought about the detail that had bothered him from the beginning,
the way the weapons had stopped, the moment the last
Haire's ship went dark, a switch being turned off. He
thought about Chorras's words in the briefing room. He thought
about the word his intelligence officer had shown him translated
from the message that had been sent to the escape
pod survivor, single word, the last one in the message
that He had looked at the original recording of that communication,
something very few people had seen. He had watched the
alien face on the screen, the tired eyes, the careful
expression please. He pressed the communicator on his console, open
a channel. He said, all frequencies translation active. He paused
and record everything. There was a brief silence on the bridge.
His communications officer looked up at him for just a moment,
not questioning, He just noting, and then activated the system
channel open. Admiral Daffa looked at the image of the
single ship on his display, a battered, scarred, ancient looking
vessel surrounded by three hundred of the finest worships in
the dominion. It looked in an odd way, like a
very old animal that had wandered into a place it
didn't belong and was simply standing at grant with the
dignity it had no right to have. He found that
he did not want to fire at it. He found that,
in more than almost anything he could remember, he did
not want to be the person who gave that order.
This is fleet Admiral Draffer of the Imperial Dominion, he said,
And his voice came out steady and careful the way
he spoke when he meant every word. I have received
your transmission. I have read the record of your previous
communication with our forces. He paused. I am told my
orders or to destroy your vessel. He paused again. I
am going to deviate from those orders in one respect.
I am going to speak with you. First. He waited
for the transmission to lay, to carry his words, and
for the reply to come back. Tell me about yourself,
Tell me where you are from, Tell me, honesty, what
you're doing here. I am lessening. The resolve was quiet
for the seven second it took the signal to travel
and come back. Then a voice came through the channel,
the human voice translated into Dominion language by assistant that
had clearly been assembled with great effort from limited data.
The voice was rough and tired, and something in the
cadence of it, even translated, even filter for an alien
translation algorithm, carried a quality that Draffa recognized from a
lifetime of listening to soldiers. It was honesty, plain and complicated, honesty,
the voice of someone who was simply too tired to
be anything other than direct. My name is Captain A
luh of Os, The voice said. We come from a
galaxy cold, the Milky Way, in which is approximately two
point three million light years from here. We entered a
spatial anomaly that brought us here by accident twenty two
months ago, and we have been looking for our way
home ever since. Pause. We are a crew of two
hundred sixty three people. We have sinedists, engineers, soldiers, a
medical team, and a navigator who has not slept a
full light in almost two years, trying to find a
way back. Another pause, shorter this time. We have not
come here to harm any one. We do not want
your territory, we do not understand your politics, and we
have no interest in your wars. We want navigational data
that might help us find a slight space anomally that
leads back toward our own galaxy, and then we want
to go home. The bridge of the Volcio's judgment was
completely silent. I understand you of three hundred warships surrounding us,
was continued, I understand those ships of orders to destroy us.
I am asking ye personally to consider an alternative. A
long pause. My crew as families, children, some of them
parents waiting at how not knowing what happened to us.
Her voice didn't change, it stayed steady, professional, but the
weight behind the words was impossible to miss. We just
want to go home, Admiral. That is the beginning and
the end of it. We want to go home. The
signal went quiet. Draffer sat at his command station and
said nothing for thirty seconds. Then he said, keep the
channel open. Watch I'll respond. Shortly, he stood up. He
walked to the observation window on the side of his
bridge and looked out at the encircle ship, that small, scarred,
stubborn shape in the middle of three hundred worships, sitting
perfectly still, waiting two hundred sixty three people children back home.
A navigator who hadn't slept properly in almost two years,
he thought about his own family on Bocar, his daughter,
who was fourteen and wanted to join the fleet when
she grew up his wife, who complained that he was
never home enough. He thought about what it meant to
be lost, not temporarily, not inconveniently, but genuinely, profoundly, impossibly
lost two million light years from home in a galaxy
he stumbled into by accident, surrounded by civilizations that kept
trying to shoot at you. He went back to his station.
This is Admiral Draffer, he said into the channel, Captain Voss.
I'm going to ask my fleet to stand down from
weapons ready status. And this is not an order I
have authorization to give, and I expect I will have
to answer for it, but I am giving it. He paused,
I would like to continue this conversay. There are people
in my government who need to hear what you just said. Man,
If you will give me your patience, and I understand
that asking for patients from someone surrounded by three hundred
warships as a considerable request, I will do everything in
my authority to insure you receive a fair hearing. Another
seven second delay, then Voss's voice came back, still steady,
still tired, but something in it had shifted just slightly,
just enough to hear if you were listening carefully. Thank you, Admiral,
she said, go, We're not going anywhere. The order came
from the Imperial Palace within four hours. Fleet Admiral Draffer
was to resume his original orders immediately. The vessel was
to be destroyed. Any further delay was considered an act
of insubordination, and Draffo was informed that a relief commander
was being dispatched to take his place if he refused
to comply. Draffer read the order. He set it aside
on his council. Then he went back to his conversation
with Captain Voss Whank. They had been talking for four
hours by then, a real conversation, slow because of the
transmission delay and the imperfect translation. But ja Vas had
told him about humanity, not in a formal way, not
like a prepared speech, but in the way of someone
answering direct questions honestly, because they had decided that honesty
was the only strategy left. She had told him about Earth,
about the wars humanity had fought among themselves before they
reached the stars, about the wars they had fought after,
about the things they had encountered in their own galaxy
that had nearly destroyed them, and how they had survived
them anyway. Draffer had asked direct questions and received direct answers,
and the picture that had emerged was unlike anything he
had expected. Humanity was not, by his people's standards, especially large.
The territory in their own galaxy was not vast, their
population was not enormous, and their technology was advanced, but
not in ways that suggested an ancient, settled civilization. It
was the technology of a species that had been repeatedly
pushed through its limits and had responded each time by
working harder and building stronger and refusing to stop. What
they had in extraordinary quantities was stubbornness and adaptability, and
a very specific quality of that Draffa found difficult to
name exactly, a kind of forward, looking at him nation
that expressed itself not as aggression but as a refusal
to accept that things couldn't be made better, a refusal
to give up. Not the fearlessness of something that had
never known danger, but the hard and come of something
that had been afraid many times and had learned to
work through it. He had been a soldier his whole life.
He knew what real strength looked like and this was
real strength. He read the relief order again, then he
put it down again. Corath, he said, his second in
command appeared at a sighed immediately, Admiral, what's the current status
of communication links with Oolkara stand of relay? All channels open? Good?
I want you to prepare a full transmission for Senator
Lawn after his office. Everything we've discussed with the resolve,
the full record unedited, every word. Send it now, I
before anything else changes. Corap was quiet for a moment.
That will be viewed as going around the Emperor's office. Yes,
Draffor said it will be. Korf looked at him for
a moment, then he nodded once and went to do it.
Senator o' lawn had not left a Senate district since
the fail vote. She had set up a working space
in her offices, and she had been sleeping in a
chair because she didn't want to be far from her
communication terminals. One of Velschow had been with her most
of that time. He had leaved. He hadn't taken in
two years, and he spent it sitting across from her,
working through the data they had trying to find a
path through the political situation that didn't end with three
hundred worships destroying something that didn't deserve to be destroyed.
Vena had come to see them on the second day.
The young Center officer had been debriefed by military intelligence
for fourteen years following her rescue here, and she had
been placed on administrative leave, not quite punishment, but clearly
not trust either. While the events she had witnessed were assessed,
she had been told clearly, if not explicity, that her
personal observations were not relevant to the military analysis. She
had decided that they were relevant to someone else's analysis.
She sat in Lareen's office and told the senator everything
she had seen, not the sense of data that was
in the report, the things that weren't in the report.
The waitership had moved after the battle, slowly, carefully, like
something that was to the signal that had kept broadcasting
even while the fleet was arranging to attack the face
on the screen the word at the end. Lauren had
listened to all of it without interrupting. When venture finish,
the Center had sat very still for a while, and
then had said, quietly, you made the right choice coming
here now. On the third day, the transmission from Admiral
Draffer arrived. Lauren read it in full, all of it,
the conversation with Valse, the questions and answers, the complete
record of four iyos of talking between a Dominion fleet
admiral and the captain of the most isolated vessel Lorna
had ever heard of. She read it once quickly, and
then went back and read it again, slowly, paying attention
to every exchange. Then she went to the Senate. The
second session was different from the first. Partly it was
Draffer's transmission. Lauren had it distributed to every senator before
decision began, and the content of a change the room
in ways that were hard to define precisely but impossible
to miss. A flat military report about an alien ship
destroying forty warships was one thing. Four iOS of conversation
with a lost crew asking for help finding their way
home was something else. Entirely. Partly it was Ventha. Lauren
had brought her to the session as a witness, which
was unusual but not unprecedented. Aunt the young officer, stood
at the speaker's position and answered questions with the same precise,
factual style she used when filing center reports. But the
facts she was conveying were not numbers and technical readings.
She described the face on the screen. She described to
broadcast that had been going out before the battle, the
request to communicate that nobody had answered. She described the
word at the end of the transmission, monering the way
she had felt sitting in that skip pod in the
wreckage of forty ships, listening to an alien vorsay, pleased
through broken translation software. The chamber was quieter than Lorrain
had ever heard. Hartly, it had to be said. It
was the emperor's absence from this session. Falthano's had been ill,
nothing serious, according to the official communications, but enough to
keep him confined to the inner Palace. His influence was
so present in the room, aunt in the senators who
aligned with him, and in the general weight of his
decades long dominance over the political structure, but he was
not there to apply direct pressure, and in his absence
the room breed to little Differently, Lauren took the floor last.
She didn't make a long speech. She didn't try to
be dramatic. She was sixty three years old and had
been a senator for thirty one years, and she had
learned that the most effective thing. You could you in
a roomful of frightened a powerful people, wast be calm
and clear and refuse to waste words. We have a choice,
she said. We can destroy this vessel. We can do
her to day, Draff. His fleet is in position, and
if we relieve him and send a commander who will
follow orders without thinking, it will be done before nightfall.
The ship will be gone. Two hundred sixty three people
who want to go home will be dead. And somewhere
in a galaxy we cannot reach, there are people who
built their ship and send it out, and eventually they
will notice it hasn't come back. And eventually they will
come looking, she paused, We will have told them by
what we do to day what kind of people we are.
She looked round the chamber. Or we can do something
we have never done in six thousand years of Dominion history.
We can let a vessel leave our territory in peace.
We can give them the navigational data that might help
them find their way home. One we can tell the
rest of the galaxy and whoever is waiting in the
other galaxy, that when the Dominion encountered something powerful and
unknown and the loane, we chose to ask questions first.
Another pause longer. That is not weakness. I want to
be very clear about that. It is not weakness. It
is a kind of strength that is worth having, the
kind that doesn't cost you everything. Eventually, the vote was
forty four to thirty nine, with five O persentions. It
was enough. The official word reached Draffa six hours later,
the destruction order was suspended. He was authorized cautiously, with
more conditions than he had ever seen attached to a
single military authorization, to continue communications and to work toward
a provisional agreement. He informed Captain Foss immediately. There was
a pause after his transmission, longer than the signal delay
would explain. When her voice came back, it was still professional,
still composed, but Draffa had been listening to it for
days by now, and he heard the breath underneath the words,
the kind of breath Yoletta. After holding it for a
very long time, Thank you, Admiral, she said, tell me
what you need from us. Then. Agociations took three days.
They were conducted between Voss and Draffed directly, with Loreen's
office participating through relay and or by serving as the
results primary translator and technical liaison. Where they were not simple,
they were deepen certainties on both sides, and more than
once the discussion stalled on points were the cultural gap
between Humanity the Dominion was simply too wide to bridge quickly.
But they kept talking. That was the essential thing. They
kept talking, and they kept working, and every time a
wall appeared, they went round it rather than through it.
What they agreed to, finally, was modest by the standards
of what either side had hoped for, ungenerous by the
standards of what either side had expected. The Dominion would
provide the Adamantine Resolve with navigational charts of this galaxy
stellar geography, information that would take Obay's calculations and give
them the contexts they had been missing for two years.
They would also provide an analysis of known spatial anomalies
in the outer regions, at which joe By thought gave
him a minimum strong lead on were to look for
a slip space for turn point in exchange. Humanity's first
contact with the Dominion would be recorded as peaceful, something
Laurene had insisted on because she understood the long term
important of how the story would be told. There were
things that couldn't be agreed on in three days. There
were things that would need to be returned to by
other people, even in other conversations, that neither Voss nor
Draffa would necessarily be part of the shape of what
humanity and the dominion might eventually be to each other. Allies,
trading partners, an easy neighbor, something that didn't have a
name yet, was not something that could be decided by
one battleship captain and one fleet conducting negotiations and imperfect
translation software. But they had started it. That was what mattered.
On the day before the Resolve was scheduled to depart,
it thus made an unusual request. She asked if it
was possible to speak directly visually, face to face over
the channel with Draffa and any of his staff who
were willing. It was unusual, Everything about this situation was unusual.
Draffa agreed. He gathered his bridge crew around the communication screen.
Most of them had never seen a human face, and
this stood in a half circle, and they looked at
the screen and tried to maintain the professional composure of
do many A naval officers, while their expression said clearly
enough for anyone to read that this was the strangest
and most remarkable thing they had ever experienced on the screen.
Voss looked back at them. She was sitting at what
appeared to be the command station of her bridge, and
her crew was array behind her in a similar arrangement.
Two hundred sixty three people when it felt like all
crowded in to see, though of course it was only
a fraction of that, as many as the camera could capture.
They were all different from each other in ways that
Draffare found fascinating. Different heights, different skin colors, different ages,
in different states of tidiness and uniform regulation compliants. They
looked like a crew that had been through a very
long expedition and had stopped worrying about the small things
a while ago. They looked happy, he realized, not joyce,
too tired for that, but genuinely, quietly happy, the particular
happiness of people who had been afraid for a very
long time and had just been given a reason to hope.
Foss's face for the first time in all their hours
of conversation showed something other than careful professionalism. There was
a smile on it, not large, but real. I wanted
to say thank you, she said, with a face attached
to it. So it means something more than words on
a channel. She paused, yieher, I know what your is
to make this happen, Admiral. I know it was a
simple choice. I know you had orders, and I know
what following orders and not following orders can cost a
person in a military structure. She looked directly at the camera.
He did something brave. I wanted you to know that
a lot of people understand that. Drafford didn't answer immediately.
He was not accustomed to being thanked. The Dominion fleet
was not a place where thanks were common. Express When
you found that he didn't entirely know what to do
with it, he settled for honesty. You also did something brave,
he said, sitting still. Well, three hundred ships surrounded you,
not fighting, waiting. He paused, that is harder than fighting.
I think many people in my fleet would not have
been capable of it. Voss was quite for a moment.
Then she said, We've had a lot of practice. The
Adamantine Resolve left the following morning. It departed slowly at first,
and moving through the outer edge of the fleet formation
as the Dominion worships cleared a path. The three hundred
ships held their positions in a vast spread across space.
The single human vessel moved between them and out the
other side, and then accelerated away into the dark. Draffa
watched it go on as main display. He watched it
until it was too small to see with the naked
eye and only visible on the census screen. He watched
it until Oba's calculations, he fared by the dominion navigational data,
took the Resolve toward the outer regions, where the anomaly
data suggested a possible return point. Then it jumped, not
a Dominion style dumb not the clean established fold of
a properly mapped hyperlane, something faster, stranger, less predictable, a
bright flash of distorted space that the Resolve punched through
like a needle through cloth. And then it was gone.
The censors recorded its dress signature in local space that
faded within seconds one one two million light years toward home, hopefully,
or at least towards somewhere that might lead there. Carrying
Oba's calculations and the navigational shots and the months of
dato by head built up, all of it, now finally
given the context it had been missing. The bridge of
the Valcor's judgment was quiet. Admiral his communications officer said,
we have a response from Valcarra from the Emperor's office.
Drafa turned read it. The communications officer read it. It
was not a pleasant message. It detailed at length Draffa's
relations of direct orders, his insubordination in coping Senator Lawn's
office with classified communications, his failure to perform his assigned mission,
and his general conduct as a fleet officer over the
preceding days. It informed him that he would face a
formal review board upon his return to Volcara. He listened
to it with the same expression he had worn throughout
everything else, steady, patient, not afraid. Acknowledged receipt, he said.
He looked at the space where the resolve had been.
Then he looked at the debris field still visible at
the age of sence, arranged the remnants of the forty
ships from the first engagement. Then he looked at his
bridge crew, the people who had stood beside him through this,
who had watched him make choices they hadn't been sure about,
and had stayed with him anyway. His Communication's officerer was
watching him Admiral, the young officer said carefully, error, should
we report it as a victory? Straffa thought about Voss's
face and the screen, the tied smile, the thanks that
had come of the face attached to it. He thought
about three hundred ships around Unding one batted vessel and
that vessels sitting still and waiting and asking a complete
sincerity to be heard. He thought about what winning and
losing actually meant when he took them out of the
context of weapons and body counts and put them into
the context of what kind of people you chose to
be reported? As a warning, he said quietly to ourselves
about what we almost did. Nobody in the bridge bow
for a moment. Then Korrath, standing to his left, made
a low sound that might have been agreement, and turned
back to his station. One by one. The rest of
the bridge crew did the same, back to their consoles,
back to their work, back to the ordinary business of
a fleet that had just been part of something extraordinary
and was now figuring out what came after. In the
Senate on Volkara, Senator Lauri natterphiled a formal record of
the engagement and its resolution, and made sure it was
entered into the permanent Imperial Archives in the way that
all official records were sale for a period, then eventually
public in March. She made sure of the record was complete,
not just the military parts, all of it. The signal
before the first battle that nobody had answered the word
at the end of the message to the escape pod
four eyeus of conversation between an admiral and a captain
who were trying very hard to understand each other. She
wanted it in the record because she understood something that
Emperor and the military hawks and the frightened senators did
not yet fully understand. That something had happened here that
was bigger than a battle or a political decision that
somewhere out in a galaxy they couldn't reach. There were
people who had sent a ship so far from home
that finding the way back had taken years of work,
can hope and refusal to give up. That when those
people had been surrounded in a gun and given every
reason in the world to fight, they had chosen to
sit still and wait and ask him broken translation software
for a chance to be heard, and eventually someone had listened.
She wanted that in the record because she believed she genuinely,
deeply believed that it was going to matter, not just now, later,
years from now, decades from now, when other choices had
to be made and other meetings had to happen. She
wanted someone in the future to be able to look
back at this moment and see what had been possible
and what had been chosen. She filed the record and
went to the window and looked out of Okara, the
towers and the lights in the city that never truly
slept above it. The sky was four stars. Among those stars,
impossibly far away, two hundred sixty three people were going home.
She thought that was worth knowing about. She thought that
was worth remembering. Somewhere in the dark between galaxies, the
Adamantine Resolve was running hard. Captain Allarov All sat in
her command chair with a fresh cap of coffee and
watched the stars move on the main screen. Different stars
than the ones she had grown up watching, Different stars
than the one she had navigated by for her entire career,
but stars none the less. The universe was full of them.
That had always been for her a source of comfort,
rather than fear. So much of it out there, so
much to find. Ob I was at his station. He
had not slept in thirty two hours. He had the
Dominion navigational charts spread across three screens, and his own
calculations on a fourth, and he was working through them
with the focused, rapid energy of someone who had been
given a quito luck. They had been staring at for
almost two years. Captain, he said, without looking up, Oh, by,
I think I have it. He paused. The bridge went
very quiet. There's an anomaly signature about four months from
our current position, consistent with SLIPT space activity in a
region the Dominion charts described as navigationally unstable, which, based
on what happened to us two years ago, is probably
why we ended up here in the first place. He
looked up from his screens. His eyes were red from tiredness,
but the expression in them was something she hadn't seen
in a long time. If I'm reading this right, and
I'm fairly confident i'm reading this rite, that's a door home.
Four months after two years four months was almost nothing.
Foss looked at him navigator for a moment. Then she
looked round the bridge, at the crew that had been
through everything with her, that had survived the wrong turn
and the two years of searching and the fights they
hadn't wanted, and the diplomacy they hadn't been trained for.
She looked at all of them and they looked back
at her, and nobody said anything, because there wasn't anything
to say that felt equal to the moment. She turned
back to the front sec horse, she said, and the
Adamantine Resolve ran on through the dark toward home. And
that is the end. Thank you for listening, and I
will see you in the next one. An