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Speaker 1: Hullo. I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.

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Let's get into it. The alert came at the worst

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possible time. Grand Admiral Sarath Khan was in the middle

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of a formal dinner with three senators and the High

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Commander of the Western Fleet when his personal communicator buzzed

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against his wrist. He ignored it the first time, He

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ignored it the second time. When it buzzed a third

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time in less than a minute, he excused himself from

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the table, stepped out on to the wide stone balcony

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of the Imperial Palace and answered the voice in the

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other end belonged to his night watch officer, a young

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male named Coorvin, and the voice was shaking. That was

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the first sign something was very wrong. Kauviin had been

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working the night desk for eleven years. Sir ath Kahan

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had never heard him shake before. Admiral Couvin said, we

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have lost contact with Border Patrol Cruizer seven hundred ninety four,

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thus known position the outer Veil sector. Final transmission came

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in twelve minutes ago. Sir, you need to see what

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they sent. Sath con stood in the balcony and looked

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out over the lights of Ookara. The fir and world

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of the Dominion Empire stretched out before him in every direction,

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towers of white stone and blue glass reaching up into

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the night sky, the glow of ten million lights reflecting

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off low clouds, the distant hum of the city that

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never truly slept. It was the most powerful planet in

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fourteen thousand star systems. It had not been threatened in

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six hundred years. Send it to my personal screen, he said,

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I'll be there in twenty minutes. He was there in twelve.

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The Imperial Fleet Command Center sat deep beneath the palace,

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carved into the bedrock of the planet itself. It was

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a vast circular room, filled with holographic displays, rows of

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analysts at their stations, and the quiet, constant noise of

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date to flowing in from every corner of the Dominion's territory.

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Sareth Khan had spent more of his life in this

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room than anywhere else. He knew every light on every panel.

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He knew the difference between a normal alert and a

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series one, just from the color of the indicators to night.

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The indicators were color he had not seen in a

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very long time, but deep solid red, not the flashing

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red of a minor emergency, the steady red of something

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that had already happened and could not be undone. Corvin

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met him at the door and led him directly to

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the central display without saying a word. The other annalists

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at their stations require as too quiet. They were all

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watching him. That was another bad sign. The image on

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the central display was grainy and broken. It had clearly

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been captured in a hurry, pulled from the board of

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Cruz's external censor array in the last seconds before transmission

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was cut off. Parts of it were blurred by static,

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parts of it were simply missing, replaced by dark blocks

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where the data had been corrupted, But enough of it

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was there, so off Con looked at the image for

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a long time without speaking. Nay. It was a ship,

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that much was certain, But it was unlike any ship

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he had ever seen in forty years of naval service.

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It was enormous. The size comparison markers automatically generated by

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the Census system showed it to be nearly twice the

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length of a Dominion heavy dreadnought, which was itself the

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largest class of vessel in the Imperial Fleet. But It

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wasn't just the size that stopped him. It was the shape.

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Every space far and civilization that dominion had ever encountered

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built ships that were smooth, curved, aerodynamic in form, even

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where aerodynamics meant nothing in the vacuum of space. It

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was simply what intelligent minds tended toward. Flean lines, heligan shapes,

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ships that looked as though they belonged among the stars.

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This thing looked like it had been built to survive them.

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It was angular and hard edged, all flat plates in

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sharp corners. Its hull was dark, not painted dark, but dark,

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the way old iron gets dark after it has been

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through fire, scarred, burned in places marked with lines of

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damage that had been repaired and then damaged again, and

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repaired again so many times that the repairs themselves had

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become part of the hull. Long deep grooves ran along

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its sides, the kind of marks left by weapons that

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had grazed it but not killed it. There were areas

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where the plating had been replaced so many times that

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the colors didn't match, creating a patchwork look that somehow

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made it look more dangerous, not less. The ship was moving.

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Even in the still image, the sense of data showed

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velocity markers that made Sarath Khan's jaw titan. It was true,

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wabbling at a speed that should have been impossible for

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something that size, and it was heading inward toward populated space.

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On the lower section of the hull, barely visible through

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the damage in the age and the grime of what

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looked like years in deep space, there were markings and

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characters in some unknown skirt cut deep into the metal.

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Has anyone been able to read that? Saaf Kon asked.

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We sent it to the Zeno Linguistics division. As soon

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as we received the transmission. Coven said, they're working on it. Now.

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What destroyed the cruiser? Corven hesitated. We don't know that

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it was destroy Sir. There was no explosion recorded, no

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debris field detected. The transmission simply stopped. The ship went silent.

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Sieroth Khan looked at the image again. What was the

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cruiser's crew compliment two hundred forty, Sir? Nobody in the

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room said anything. The Zeno Linguistics team worked through the night.

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There were a small division, mostly academics who had been

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folded into Imperial Intelligence because of the dominion. Occasionally encounter ruins

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of dead civilizations during its expansion and needed someone to

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make sense of what they found. They were used to

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working on fragments of ancient texts, cove stones, mondetta chich

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recovered from long dead ships. They were not used to

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being woken at midnight and told to decipher something as

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a matter of urgent military priority. But they worked, and

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by the time the first pale light of dawn was

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beginning to show above the Volcaros sky line, a scene

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yelling was named the same made a discovery that made

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her stop completely and simply stereot as screened for several

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long seconds before she called her director. The script in

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the wholl was not in any active database, as that

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was expected, but it was an entirely unknown either. Dissat

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had run it through every archive the Dominion possessed, including

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the deep arcas where old forgotten data went to collect

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test and she had found a match, a partial match

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three characters out of appeared to be a longer sequence.

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The match came from a report filed three hundred twelve

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years ago by a long range exploration probe that had

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been sent into a region of space far beyond the

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Dominion's borders. A tiny satellite galaxy orbiting on the edge

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of the larger galactic structure that the Dominion called home.

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The probe had detected unusual energy sigatures and had captured

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images of what appeared to be debris from some kind

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of conflict. Among the debris were fragments of help plating.

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The probe had photographed the fragments before being destroyed by

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a piece of fast moving wreckage. The images had been filed, archived,

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and entirely forgotten about for three centuries. The characters on

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those ancient hull fragments matched three of the characters and

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the ship in the border censor image. Dissat's hands were

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not quite steady when she typed up her report. She

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crossed reference the match three times before she included it.

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She was a careful person by nature, and she didn't

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want to cause a panic over a coincidence. But it

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was to coincidence. She was sure of that the script

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was too specific, too consistent. This was the same written language.

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Whatever had been in that satellite galaxy three hundred years ago,

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and whatever was now moving through the outer veil at

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an impossible speed came from the same place. She flagged

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the single segment of texts that her translation algorithms had

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been able to partially process four characters one partial word

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why U NSS. She didn't know what it meant, Her

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algorithms didn't know what it meant, but it was a

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name or part of one. And now we had a face,

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a massive, scarred, fast moving face that had just silenced

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a two hundred forty person border patrol cruiser without leaving

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a debris field. She sent her report to the Admiral's

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office and went to make herself a cup of something hot,

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because she suspected it was going to be a very

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long day. Seeof Khan read the report twice, then he

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called in his senior staff. By mid morning, the entire

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upper command of the Imperial Fleet was gathered in the

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main briefing room beneath the palace. Maps covered every wall.

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The grainy image of the unknown vessel was displayed at

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the front of the room, enlarged and enhanced as much

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as the original date allowed. It didn't look any less

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alarming at a larger size. Siov con stood at the

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head of the table and went through everything they knew,

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which was not much. An own vessel, my unknown origin

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satellite galaxy possibly or something connected to one speed and

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size beyond current Dominion capability border cruise of silence without

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debris moving toward populated space. Bate of travel suggested it

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would reach the first inhabited system in the Veil Corridor

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approximately three days. Recommendations, he said the room gave him several.

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They ranged from immediate diplomatic contact proposed by zapply one person,

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a young intelligence officer named Veal, who every one else

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in the room visibly disagreed with, to full military interception

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by the largest force they could assemble an available time.

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The military option one. It wasn't even close. Sierov Khan

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authorized the deployment of Battle Group Paris forty warships, including

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six heavy cruisers, twelve destroyer class vessels, and the rest

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a mix of combat frigates and support craft. It was

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a serious force. It had pacified rebellious systems before it out,

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destroyed pirate fleets, and broken the naves of civilizations that

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had made the mistake of challenging the Dominion. Forty ships

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against one, the mass seemed reasonable. The mass seemed, in

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fact overwhelmingly in the Dominion's favor. Fleet Admiral Harris himself

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took command of the group. He was a hard man,

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experienced and decorated, and he had the confidence of some

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one who had never lost a major engagement. He reviewed

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the censor image of the unknown vessel with the calm

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assessment of a professional, and concluded that while the ship

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was large, large ships heard weaknesses targeting systems, power distribution nodes,

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engine sections. Every ship had them. His weapons officers would

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find them. He departed with de Nires, his forty ships

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foreman up around his flagship in perfect order, the pride

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of the Imperial Fleet cutting for space toward the outer Veil.

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The Dominion had a very long history, six thousand years

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of recorded expansion, conquests, diplomacy, and war. In that time,

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it had encountered forty three distinct space faring civilizations. Of those,

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thirty one had been absorbed into the Empire, either the

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Negotiation or Force. Nine had been destroyed when they proved

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too difficult to absorb and too dangerous to leave alone.

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Free currently existed in a state of uneasy truce al

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on the Dominion's borders, kept in check by the threat

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of the Imperial Fleet. Not one of those forty three

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civilizations had ever made the dominion afraid, uncomfortable, sometimes cautious occasionally,

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but not a frayed. The dominion was simply too large,

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too old, and too powerful to be afraid of anything

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it had yet encountered. That was about to change. Three

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days after Battle Group Harrows departed for Karr, the long

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range communication network registered a brief burst of transmission from

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the Veil corridor. It lasted less than four seconds. It

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was heavily fragmented. The analysts worked on it for an

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hour before they could reconstruct enough of it to understand

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what it contained. It was not a battle report from

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Admiral Harrows. It was not a status update or a

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tactical assessment. It was a distress beacon, a single automated

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emergency signal of the type that activated when a ship's

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main systems were destroyed but its emergency corps was still functioning,

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just one beacon out of forty ships. SIERRAF. Khan was

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in his office when they told him. Well. He did

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not react visibly. He had trained himself over decades not

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to react visibly to bad news. Because a grand admiral

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who looked afraid made everyone else afraid, and afraid people

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made bad decisions. He sat very still and looked at

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the report on his desk and breathed slowly and said

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nothing for almost a full minute. Then he asked for

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the ze Ino Linguistics report again, the one with the

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four character fragment hunsk. He read it again, slowly, as

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though there was something in it he had missed the

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first two times. There was. It was the same report,

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four characters, no meaning, a connection to a satellite galaxy

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three centuries old, a ship that had just eaten forty

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warships and kept moving. He set the report down. He

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looked at the map on his wall, the full extent

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of the Dominion Empire fourteen thousand SAW systems, the greatest

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power this galaxy had ever seen. Then he looked at

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the small marker on the map that showed the last

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known position of the unknown vessel, still moving, still heading inward.

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He thought about something that the young intelligence officer Fell

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had said in the briefing, the one every one had dismissed.

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What if they are not here to conquer? What if

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they're here for something else? Entirely nobody had answered the question.

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Nobody had thought it was worth answering. Wazarathconne was beginning

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to think it might have been the most important question

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in the room. He called for his senior staff again.

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When they filed and saw his face. The room and

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very quiet, very fast, because this time, for the first

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time in the memory of any one present, the Grand

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Admiral of the Imperial Fleet looked like a man who

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00:11:57,519 --> 00:12:00,960
was not entirely sure what to do next. Outside, above

240
00:12:00,960 --> 00:12:03,320
the palace, above the towers and the lights of Elcara,

241
00:12:03,360 --> 00:12:06,200
the sky was clear and full of stars. Somewhere, out

242
00:12:06,240 --> 00:12:08,879
beyond the stars, something old and scarred and very far

243
00:12:08,919 --> 00:12:11,799
from home was still moving, still heading inward, still as

244
00:12:11,799 --> 00:12:15,039
far as anyone knew, completely unchallenged. And in the wreckage

245
00:12:15,039 --> 00:12:17,480
of forty Imperial warships, somewhere in the dock of the

246
00:12:17,480 --> 00:12:21,159
Outer Ale, a single automated beacon was still blinking, one beacon,

247
00:12:21,480 --> 00:12:23,840
one survivor, and nobody yet knew what they had seen.

248
00:12:24,440 --> 00:12:27,559
Venture had been a censor officer for three years. She

249
00:12:27,679 --> 00:12:30,519
was twenty two years old. She had joined the Imperial

250
00:12:30,600 --> 00:12:32,679
Fleet because she was good at numbers, and her father

251
00:12:32,759 --> 00:12:34,799
had served, and she wanted to see more of the

252
00:12:34,840 --> 00:12:37,360
galaxy than the small agricultural world she had grown up on.

253
00:12:38,240 --> 00:12:41,600
She had expected patrol routes, border surveys, maybe some minor

254
00:12:41,639 --> 00:12:45,039
piracy suppression if she was unlucky. She had not expected this.

255
00:12:45,879 --> 00:12:47,919
She was floating in an escape pod rophy the size

256
00:12:47,960 --> 00:12:51,039
of a large closet. The potted here for seventy two rows,

257
00:12:51,320 --> 00:12:54,039
water for forty eight, and the single emergency transmitted that

258
00:12:54,120 --> 00:12:57,320
she had already activated. Through the pods one small porthole,

259
00:12:57,360 --> 00:12:59,639
she could see the debris field that had approximately four

260
00:12:59,639 --> 00:13:01,919
hours of gope in forty of the most powerful warships

261
00:13:01,919 --> 00:13:04,879
in the Dominion Empire. She was trying very hard not

262
00:13:04,919 --> 00:13:07,840
to look at all of it. She was not entirely succeeding.

263
00:13:08,320 --> 00:13:11,000
The unknown ship was still out there. She could see

264
00:13:11,000 --> 00:13:13,399
it through the porthole when it passed within visual range,

265
00:13:14,000 --> 00:13:17,919
A dark angular shape moving slowly, now, almost carefully, you

266
00:13:18,000 --> 00:13:21,360
among the wreckage. It was not running. It had no

267
00:13:21,440 --> 00:13:24,360
reason to run. It had destroyed the entire battle group

268
00:13:24,360 --> 00:13:26,720
in less than twenty minutes, and it was simply drifting,

269
00:13:26,840 --> 00:13:28,679
as if it was taking stock of what had happened

270
00:13:28,840 --> 00:13:32,039
or looking for something. Ventha had her recording equipment running.

271
00:13:32,639 --> 00:13:35,000
She had activated at the moment the battle started. Because

272
00:13:35,039 --> 00:13:37,399
she was a censor officer and Recording things was what

273
00:13:37,480 --> 00:13:39,879
she did, and also because some part of her had

274
00:13:39,919 --> 00:13:42,200
understood very quickly that what was happening was something that

275
00:13:42,279 --> 00:13:44,720
needed to be recorded. Even if nobody ever to reave

276
00:13:44,759 --> 00:13:47,320
the pot, even if they ran out before anyone found her,

277
00:13:47,960 --> 00:13:51,159
the record needed to exist. So she watched, and she recorded,

278
00:13:51,240 --> 00:13:54,039
and she tried to understand what she was seeing. The battle,

279
00:13:54,200 --> 00:13:55,919
if it could be called, that, had not started the

280
00:13:55,919 --> 00:13:59,120
way battles usually started. Battle Group Powers had found the

281
00:13:59,159 --> 00:14:01,759
unknown vessel Egos exactly where the projection said it would be,

282
00:14:01,879 --> 00:14:04,360
crossing the midpoint of the Veil corridor at a steady pace.

283
00:14:05,039 --> 00:14:08,080
The ship had been easy to detect. It wasn't hiding,

284
00:14:08,759 --> 00:14:12,080
It wasn't even trying to hide. It was broadcasting something,

285
00:14:12,639 --> 00:14:15,600
a signal on multiple frequencies, repeating on a regular cycle,

286
00:14:16,159 --> 00:14:19,519
the same pattern, over and over. The fleet's communication analyst

287
00:14:19,559 --> 00:14:21,639
hadn't been able to decode it in the time available,

288
00:14:21,759 --> 00:14:24,879
but the pattern was clearly deliberate. It was clearly meant

289
00:14:24,919 --> 00:14:28,159
to be heard. Admiral Harrows had been unmoved by the signal.

290
00:14:28,639 --> 00:14:30,919
He had disorders, and his orders were to stop the

291
00:14:31,000 --> 00:14:34,120
vessel before it reached and inhabited space. He had arranged

292
00:14:34,120 --> 00:14:37,159
his forty ships in a standard intercept formation, a wide

293
00:14:37,200 --> 00:14:39,519
net of warships designed to cut off any possible direction

294
00:14:39,600 --> 00:14:42,399
of his gape, and had charged his weapons in Venture's

295
00:14:42,399 --> 00:14:44,360
station on one of the cruisers. She had watched an

296
00:14:44,399 --> 00:14:46,720
unknown vessel on her census screen and noted something that

297
00:14:46,840 --> 00:14:49,919
she hadn't purported because there had been no time, and

298
00:14:50,000 --> 00:14:52,679
also because she hadn't been sure what it meant. The

299
00:14:52,799 --> 00:14:56,279
unknown vessel had detected them almost immediately. Its course had

300
00:14:56,320 --> 00:14:58,799
not changed, its speed had not changed, and its broadcast

301
00:14:58,840 --> 00:15:01,879
signal that repeating unknown pattern on multiple frequencies had not

302
00:15:02,000 --> 00:15:05,720
changed either. It just kept broadcasting right up until the

303
00:15:05,720 --> 00:15:08,279
moment Admiral Harrows gave the order to fire. The first

304
00:15:08,279 --> 00:15:11,919
salvo from forty Dominion warships was by any objective measure, tremendous.

305
00:15:13,000 --> 00:15:15,399
Plasmo lancers from the heavy cruisers hit the target with

306
00:15:15,519 --> 00:15:18,559
enough energy to mount a small moon mass. Driver rounds

307
00:15:18,559 --> 00:15:20,600
from the destroyer clasp punch space at a fraction of

308
00:15:20,639 --> 00:15:24,039
the speed of light. Graviten bombs, the Dominion's most powerful

309
00:15:24,080 --> 00:15:26,960
conventional weapon, detonated in a spread pattern designed to shatter

310
00:15:27,000 --> 00:15:29,480
hull integrity across the entire length of the target vessel,

311
00:15:30,080 --> 00:15:32,759
all of it hit. Then the head washed her censors

312
00:15:32,799 --> 00:15:35,879
and confirmed it every single weapon in that first salvo

313
00:15:35,919 --> 00:15:38,960
had connected with the unknown ship. The unknown ship had

314
00:15:39,039 --> 00:15:43,120
kept moving, not unchanged. Her senses had registered impacts, heat blooms,

315
00:15:43,200 --> 00:15:46,240
stressed readings along the hull. The weapons had done something,

316
00:15:46,360 --> 00:15:49,440
but the ship had not slowed, It had not broken apart.

317
00:15:50,000 --> 00:15:51,720
It had not done any of the things that ships

318
00:15:51,720 --> 00:15:54,519
did when forty warships hit them all at once. There

319
00:15:54,519 --> 00:15:57,159
had been a pause of approximately eleven seconds after the

320
00:15:57,200 --> 00:16:00,360
first salvo. During those eleven seconds that the bro broadcast

321
00:16:00,399 --> 00:16:03,720
signal had stopped, then the unknown ship had responded. Vanda

322
00:16:03,799 --> 00:16:06,039
did not have complete footage of what happened next because

323
00:16:06,039 --> 00:16:08,559
her recording equipment had been partially damaged when the ship

324
00:16:08,639 --> 00:16:11,360
she was on took its first hit, but she had enough.

325
00:16:12,120 --> 00:16:14,200
She had the sense of data, which told its own

326
00:16:14,240 --> 00:16:17,639
story with coal complete numbers. She had partial visual from

327
00:16:17,639 --> 00:16:20,639
the external cameras before they went dark. She had audio

328
00:16:20,679 --> 00:16:22,639
of the bridge crew until the moment the bridge was hit,

329
00:16:22,840 --> 00:16:25,080
which the unknown ship had not fired, and a widespread

330
00:16:25,120 --> 00:16:27,559
the way the Dominion fleet had it had not tried

331
00:16:27,600 --> 00:16:30,559
to hit everything at once. It had picked targets one

332
00:16:30,600 --> 00:16:32,799
at a time with a precision that was almost uncomfortable

333
00:16:32,840 --> 00:16:35,799
to watch on the censor display. Heavy cruisers first, the

334
00:16:35,840 --> 00:16:38,000
most powerful ships in the formation, the ones that posed

335
00:16:38,000 --> 00:16:41,080
the greatest threat. Then the destroyer class, then the frigus

336
00:16:41,159 --> 00:16:44,759
methodical efficient. Not angry, not frantic, not the firing pattern

337
00:16:44,799 --> 00:16:47,519
of a crew panikin under attack. It was the firing

338
00:16:47,559 --> 00:16:50,480
pattern of a crew doing a job. The Dominion battle

339
00:16:50,480 --> 00:16:53,840
group had lasted nineteen minutes and forty seconds when the

340
00:16:53,879 --> 00:16:56,720
last Dominion ship went dark. The unknown vessel had stopped

341
00:16:56,720 --> 00:17:02,360
firing immediately, not gradually, not winding down immediately, like turning

342
00:17:02,399 --> 00:17:05,240
off a lett switch. The gun simply stopped, and the

343
00:17:05,279 --> 00:17:07,279
ship continued moving at the same steady piece it had

344
00:17:07,279 --> 00:17:11,039
maintained throughout, and the broadcast signal came back on the

345
00:17:11,079 --> 00:17:14,960
same signal, the same repeating pattern, you know, like nothing

346
00:17:14,960 --> 00:17:18,039
had happened. Venture was watching through her porthole when the

347
00:17:18,079 --> 00:17:20,000
unknown ship came close enough that she could see its

348
00:17:20,000 --> 00:17:23,160
tall details without the aid of instruments. She pressed herself

349
00:17:23,200 --> 00:17:25,880
against the porthole glass like a child looking into a window, Because,

350
00:17:25,920 --> 00:17:28,519
even terrified and alone and very possibly about to die,

351
00:17:28,599 --> 00:17:30,880
she was a censor officer, and she couldn't help herself.

352
00:17:31,359 --> 00:17:33,240
The ship was even bigger up close than the sense

353
00:17:33,279 --> 00:17:36,279
of readings had suggested. It filled most of her field

354
00:17:36,279 --> 00:17:38,599
of view. She could see the repair work she had

355
00:17:38,640 --> 00:17:42,279
noted in the pre bassal briefing images, the mismatched hul plaits,

356
00:17:42,400 --> 00:17:44,240
the old damage that had been patched over and then

357
00:17:44,319 --> 00:17:46,839
damaged again. There were places in the hull where she

358
00:17:46,880 --> 00:17:48,960
could count at least four distinct lays of her pair work,

359
00:17:49,039 --> 00:17:51,759
each one overlap in the last. The ship had been

360
00:17:51,759 --> 00:17:54,559
true things, many things, over a long time, and every

361
00:17:54,559 --> 00:17:56,599
time it had been damaged, some one had fixed it

362
00:17:56,640 --> 00:17:59,119
and send it back out. She was trying to figure

363
00:17:59,160 --> 00:18:01,279
out the scale of one of the larger repair patches.

364
00:18:01,839 --> 00:18:03,799
It looked like it might be older than the Dominion's

365
00:18:03,839 --> 00:18:07,119
current dynasty, when something happened that made her breath catch completely.

366
00:18:07,680 --> 00:18:09,440
A port opened in the side of the ship, not

367
00:18:09,519 --> 00:18:12,000
a weapons port, something else, and a voice came out

368
00:18:12,000 --> 00:18:15,000
of it, not through the emergency beacons basic receiver, through

369
00:18:15,039 --> 00:18:17,640
the beacon's full communication system, which meant the ship had

370
00:18:17,640 --> 00:18:21,200
somehow identified the beacon's frequency and targeted it specifically. The

371
00:18:21,279 --> 00:18:24,160
voice was speaking in an unknown language. It was a

372
00:18:24,160 --> 00:18:27,720
recorded message. She realized the same few seconds of speech

373
00:18:27,880 --> 00:18:30,279
repeating on the cycle the same way the broadcast signal

374
00:18:30,279 --> 00:18:33,759
had been repeating a different message, though this one was

375
00:18:33,799 --> 00:18:38,440
specifically directed at her powd's frequency. They knew she was there. Then,

376
00:18:38,559 --> 00:18:41,440
after the unknown language message had repeated three times, something

377
00:18:41,440 --> 00:18:45,000
else came through a face on the tiny screen of

378
00:18:45,000 --> 00:18:49,240
her emergency communicator. A face appeared. She almost dropped the communicator.

379
00:18:49,839 --> 00:18:52,279
It was unlike any face she had ever seen. The

380
00:18:52,279 --> 00:18:54,839
being had two eyes, forward facing in a flat face

381
00:18:54,839 --> 00:18:57,319
with a protruding no structure, and a white mouth. The

382
00:18:57,359 --> 00:18:59,359
skin was a pale brown color, and the face had

383
00:18:59,440 --> 00:19:02,720
lined in it, ones around the eyes and mouth, and

384
00:19:02,799 --> 00:19:05,000
the kind of lines that came from age and tiredness

385
00:19:05,000 --> 00:19:06,960
and spending a long time in places that were not

386
00:19:07,079 --> 00:19:09,720
kind to you. The hair, which grew directly from the

387
00:19:09,720 --> 00:19:12,039
top of the head and away that Venture found deeply strange,

388
00:19:12,160 --> 00:19:14,799
was gray and cut short. The being looked directly at

389
00:19:14,839 --> 00:19:18,519
the camera. Its expression was hard to read. Venture had

390
00:19:18,559 --> 00:19:21,200
spent three years learning to read dominion faces, and alien

391
00:19:21,240 --> 00:19:24,119
facial expressions were not something she had trained for. But

392
00:19:24,200 --> 00:19:26,359
she spent a long time looking at that face. Afterward,

393
00:19:26,400 --> 00:19:29,359
thinking about what she had seen later, she would decide

394
00:19:29,359 --> 00:19:32,599
that the expression was tired and sad and careful, the

395
00:19:32,640 --> 00:19:34,759
expression of some one who was working very hard to

396
00:19:34,759 --> 00:19:36,680
make sure the next thing they did was the right thing.

397
00:19:37,359 --> 00:19:40,720
The being spoke the words were unknown, but then the

398
00:19:40,759 --> 00:19:44,880
message shifted a different tone, a more mechanical quality, and

399
00:19:45,000 --> 00:19:47,720
what came through was not words, but something else, a

400
00:19:47,799 --> 00:19:52,599
translation attempt wolf It clearly assembled from the fragments of dominion,

401
00:19:52,680 --> 00:19:56,279
language captured from the border cruiser and the battle group communications,

402
00:19:56,720 --> 00:19:59,880
broken and in complete, but structured with an obvious, deliberate effort.

403
00:20:00,279 --> 00:20:04,279
We speak no morphight, we are far from a translatable.

404
00:20:04,880 --> 00:20:08,559
We are lost, We want talk, we won't go home.

405
00:20:09,079 --> 00:20:12,759
In the face again the same tired, careful expression, and

406
00:20:12,799 --> 00:20:16,240
then one more word alone, clearly considered the most important

407
00:20:16,240 --> 00:20:20,920
thing to convey. Please. The transmission ended to Vince. She

408
00:20:20,960 --> 00:20:23,720
sat in the dock of her escape pod, surrounded by

409
00:20:23,720 --> 00:20:25,920
the debris of forty warships, and stared at the blank

410
00:20:25,960 --> 00:20:29,000
screen of her communicator for a very long time. Then

411
00:20:29,000 --> 00:20:32,680
she did her job. She checked her recording equipment. She

412
00:20:32,759 --> 00:20:35,480
confirmed that everything, every second of the battle, every sense

413
00:20:35,519 --> 00:20:38,039
of reading, every piece of footage she had been captured

414
00:20:38,039 --> 00:20:41,000
and was intact. She packaged the entire record into the

415
00:20:41,000 --> 00:20:44,079
Haighs priority transmission form at the emergency Beacon could produce.

416
00:20:44,799 --> 00:20:47,599
She added her own voice record, speaking quickly and precisely,

417
00:20:47,720 --> 00:20:50,119
describing what she had seen in the ordered, factual way

418
00:20:50,160 --> 00:20:53,400
that since our officer reported data. She included the face,

419
00:20:54,160 --> 00:20:57,799
she included the translated message, She included a word at

420
00:20:57,799 --> 00:21:01,240
the end. Then she transmitted everything sheered back to aar Vokaro,

421
00:21:01,400 --> 00:21:03,480
knowing it would take time to arrive, knowing she might

422
00:21:03,519 --> 00:21:05,359
not be alied to know if any one received it

423
00:21:05,480 --> 00:21:07,839
shack and hoping very hard that whoever eventually read her

424
00:21:07,880 --> 00:21:10,400
report would pay attention to all of it, not just

425
00:21:10,440 --> 00:21:14,200
the part about forty destroyed warships, all of it. Inside

426
00:21:14,200 --> 00:21:18,640
the Unscardamantine Resolve, the mood was not celebratory. Captain Allaravus

427
00:21:18,680 --> 00:21:20,680
stood at the central command console of the bridge and

428
00:21:20,720 --> 00:21:22,920
looked at the damage report on her screen. Without any

429
00:21:22,960 --> 00:21:25,960
visible expression around her, the crew moved with the quiet

430
00:21:25,960 --> 00:21:28,039
efficiency of people who had been drew worse and knew

431
00:21:28,039 --> 00:21:30,400
how to keep working when things were bad. The bridge

432
00:21:30,400 --> 00:21:33,920
of the Resolve was a practical space. Everything functional, nothing decorative,

433
00:21:33,960 --> 00:21:36,799
every surface designed to be useful rather than impressive. It

434
00:21:36,839 --> 00:21:38,920
looked like what it was, the working environment of a

435
00:21:38,920 --> 00:21:40,880
ship that had been deployed for a very long time.

436
00:21:41,480 --> 00:21:44,200
Breach and section seven is sealed, said the damage control

437
00:21:44,240 --> 00:21:47,240
officer to her left. One how integrity at eighty three

438
00:21:47,279 --> 00:21:50,359
percent overall, reacted to his showing some fluctuation, but with

439
00:21:50,400 --> 00:21:54,039
an acceptable range. We lost three external censor arrays in

440
00:21:54,079 --> 00:21:58,359
the port side, minor casualties in the engineering section, nothing

441
00:21:58,400 --> 00:22:02,640
life threatening vasil and without interrupting. When the report was finished,

442
00:22:02,680 --> 00:22:05,119
she nodded. Once, get me a full list of what

443
00:22:05,160 --> 00:22:08,880
we expended, she said, and Massy runs Archer missiles everything.

444
00:22:09,440 --> 00:22:14,279
I want the exact count. Yes, come captain. She turned

445
00:22:14,279 --> 00:22:18,359
to her communications officer. The pod did we get a response?

446
00:22:19,079 --> 00:22:21,920
No verbal response, but it still transmitting its beacon, so

447
00:22:22,000 --> 00:22:25,079
whoever is in there is still alive. We received confirmation

448
00:22:25,119 --> 00:22:28,640
that our message was received. The beacon's frequency changed slightly

449
00:22:28,680 --> 00:22:31,839
after our transmission, which means the occupant adjusted it manually.

450
00:22:32,400 --> 00:22:35,759
They heard us. Voss nodded again. She walked to the

451
00:22:35,759 --> 00:22:38,039
side of the bridgewood. Observation windows gave a view of

452
00:22:38,039 --> 00:22:41,039
the space outside where the debris field was visible pieces

453
00:22:41,039 --> 00:22:43,400
of the ships they had just destroyed, tumbling slowly in

454
00:22:43,400 --> 00:22:45,920
the dark. She stood there for a moment and looked

455
00:22:45,960 --> 00:22:48,720
at it. Her senior staff watched her and said nothing.

456
00:22:49,279 --> 00:22:51,000
They knew her well enough to give her this moment.

457
00:22:51,680 --> 00:22:54,599
She had not wanted to fight. She had broadcast on

458
00:22:54,720 --> 00:22:57,440
every frequency they had managed to identify from the intercepted

459
00:22:57,480 --> 00:23:01,119
communications of the incoming fleet. She broadcast for the entire

460
00:23:01,119 --> 00:23:03,079
time it took the fleet to approach, and she had

461
00:23:03,160 --> 00:23:05,759
kept broadcasting right up until the moment the first weapons hit.

462
00:23:06,440 --> 00:23:08,920
She had given them every chance she could. She had

463
00:23:08,920 --> 00:23:11,359
done what she always did, everything possible to avoid the fight,

464
00:23:11,400 --> 00:23:14,359
before accepting that the fight was avoidable. But an avoidable

465
00:23:14,440 --> 00:23:18,119
was still unavoidable. And here they were. She turned back

466
00:23:18,160 --> 00:23:22,440
to the bridge navigator. Where are we? The navigator, a

467
00:23:22,480 --> 00:23:25,119
young man named Obi, who had been running calculations almost

468
00:23:25,119 --> 00:23:28,160
continuously for two years, pulled up the stale map, the

469
00:23:28,240 --> 00:23:32,079
best current estimate. Captain, approximately two point three million light

470
00:23:32,160 --> 00:23:35,680
years from home, were in a separate galaxy from ires,

471
00:23:35,720 --> 00:23:40,240
smaller than the Milky Way, but old, very old. He paused,

472
00:23:40,839 --> 00:23:43,000
the slip space anomaly that brought us here, isn't something

473
00:23:43,039 --> 00:23:45,839
I can reproduce. I've been looking for a way back

474
00:23:45,880 --> 00:23:49,319
for twenty two months. I don't have one yet. Are

475
00:23:49,359 --> 00:23:54,599
you still looking? Every day? Captain could keep looking. She

476
00:23:54,720 --> 00:23:57,680
moved back to the center of the bridge. Senior staff

477
00:23:57,720 --> 00:24:00,400
meeting in ten minutes. We need to talk about where

478
00:24:00,400 --> 00:24:03,000
we go from here. Someone in this galaxy has to

479
00:24:03,039 --> 00:24:05,640
be willing to sit down and talk. We just have

480
00:24:05,720 --> 00:24:08,240
to find them. She said it simply as a fact,

481
00:24:08,240 --> 00:24:11,440
the way she said most things, not hopefully, not dramatically,

482
00:24:12,200 --> 00:24:14,160
just as a conclusion she had reached and was now

483
00:24:14,200 --> 00:24:17,319
working from her first officer, a tall man named Rico,

484
00:24:17,480 --> 00:24:19,839
who had served with her for eleven years, fell into

485
00:24:19,880 --> 00:24:22,079
step beside her as she moved toward the briefing room.

486
00:24:22,559 --> 00:24:25,799
They outnumbered as forty to one, he said quietly. They did,

487
00:24:25,839 --> 00:24:29,880
she agreed, and they still lost. Yes, Ricca was quiet

488
00:24:29,880 --> 00:24:33,039
for a moment. Do you think they'll send more? Voss

489
00:24:33,079 --> 00:24:35,440
glanced at him. I think they'll send a lot more,

490
00:24:35,519 --> 00:24:37,319
she said, which is why we need to be talking

491
00:24:37,359 --> 00:24:40,039
to someone with authority before the next fleet arrives. She

492
00:24:40,119 --> 00:24:42,640
pushed open the door to the briefing room because I

493
00:24:42,759 --> 00:24:45,839
genuinely do not want to do that again. She sat

494
00:24:45,880 --> 00:24:47,519
down at the head of the table and pulled up

495
00:24:47,519 --> 00:24:50,559
the star charts on the room's display. Outside and in

496
00:24:50,599 --> 00:24:53,119
the dock of the veil corridor, the debris continued to drift,

497
00:24:53,720 --> 00:24:55,640
and in a small pot somewhere in that debrie, a

498
00:24:55,640 --> 00:24:58,440
young censor officer with shaking hands, was sending everything she

499
00:24:58,480 --> 00:25:00,920
had seen back to the most powerful and in the galaxy.

500
00:25:01,519 --> 00:25:04,599
Sierraf Kam would receive that report in approximately eightyen narrows.

501
00:25:05,200 --> 00:25:07,480
He would read it four times, and a word at

502
00:25:07,480 --> 00:25:09,920
the end, the single translated word, would stay with him

503
00:25:09,920 --> 00:25:12,920
longer than anything else in it. Fleas not a fret,

504
00:25:13,119 --> 00:25:16,119
not a declaration, not the word of a conquirer, just

505
00:25:16,160 --> 00:25:18,319
a very tired crew a very long way from home,

506
00:25:18,400 --> 00:25:21,200
asking for a chance to talk. He just wasn't sure

507
00:25:21,240 --> 00:25:23,039
yet if the Empire was going to give it to them.

508
00:25:23,559 --> 00:25:25,759
The Imperial Senate of the Dominion had not seen a

509
00:25:25,799 --> 00:25:29,039
session like this in four hundred years. The chamber itself

510
00:25:29,079 --> 00:25:31,880
was built to impress that was the honest truth of it,

511
00:25:31,920 --> 00:25:34,119
though no one in official Dominion history had ever written

512
00:25:34,200 --> 00:25:36,839
it dan that way. The ceiling rose so high above

513
00:25:36,880 --> 00:25:38,960
the floor that the upper galleries were sometimes lost in

514
00:25:39,039 --> 00:25:41,880
natural mist. On humid days. The seats curved in a

515
00:25:41,880 --> 00:25:44,359
great dock around the central speaking floor, teared so that

516
00:25:44,440 --> 00:25:46,720
every senator could see every other senator, and the speaker

517
00:25:46,799 --> 00:25:49,000
standing at the center could see all of them. The

518
00:25:49,079 --> 00:25:51,160
walls were carved from white stone that had been quarried

519
00:25:51,160 --> 00:25:53,559
on a moon that no longer existed, destroyed long ago

520
00:25:53,599 --> 00:25:56,480
in a weapons test. The whole room said, in a

521
00:25:56,599 --> 00:25:58,839
language of architecture that the people who built this and

522
00:25:58,880 --> 00:26:00,880
sad in these chairs with the most powerful beings in

523
00:26:00,920 --> 00:26:02,759
a known universe, and had been for a very long

524
00:26:02,799 --> 00:26:06,440
time to date. Those people looked frightened, not all of them.

525
00:26:06,599 --> 00:26:09,799
Fair expressed itself differently in different individuals. And there were

526
00:26:09,799 --> 00:26:12,359
senators carved stone seats who showed their fear of anger,

527
00:26:12,519 --> 00:26:15,039
and senators who assured it as denial, and senators who

528
00:26:15,039 --> 00:26:16,960
didn't show it at all, but sat very still and

529
00:26:17,079 --> 00:26:20,119
very pale, and contributed nothing. But the fear was there.

530
00:26:20,839 --> 00:26:23,359
ADVENTUREUS report had been classified at the highest level, but

531
00:26:23,440 --> 00:26:26,160
in the Dominion Empire, as in every large political structure

532
00:26:26,160 --> 00:26:29,160
that had ever existed anywhere, classified information had a way

533
00:26:29,160 --> 00:26:31,880
of becoming widely known, very quickly among the people who mattered.

534
00:26:31,960 --> 00:26:35,720
Forty worships gone in twenty minutes. The number moved through

535
00:26:35,720 --> 00:26:38,559
the chamber like a cold wind. People whispered it to

536
00:26:38,599 --> 00:26:41,160
each other. They erode it on data slates and passed

537
00:26:41,200 --> 00:26:43,960
those slates down the rows. They said out loud, in

538
00:26:44,000 --> 00:26:46,680
tones ranging from disbelief to outrage, to something quieter and

539
00:26:46,720 --> 00:26:49,480
more honest, something closer to genuine fear of what it meant.

540
00:26:50,039 --> 00:26:52,640
Brand Admiral sath constood at the speaker's position in the

541
00:26:52,640 --> 00:26:54,480
center of the fort and delivered his report with the

542
00:26:54,519 --> 00:26:56,599
same steady voice he always used. He gave the facts

543
00:26:56,640 --> 00:26:58,920
with that embellishment. He presented the sensitate of the frightenments

544
00:26:58,960 --> 00:27:01,799
of translated communicatation ventures testimony. He showed the image of

545
00:27:01,799 --> 00:27:04,160
their known vessel, enlarged when enhanced, displayed in the great

546
00:27:04,160 --> 00:27:06,240
screen behind him, so that every senator in the chamber

547
00:27:06,279 --> 00:27:08,359
cosided and detailed the scoured hold them as matched plate

548
00:27:08,440 --> 00:27:10,960
in the mockings. They still could not folly translate. He

549
00:27:11,039 --> 00:27:14,559
answered questions for two hours. Questions were mostly the kind

550
00:27:14,599 --> 00:27:16,680
that powerful people ask when they are afraid, in trying

551
00:27:16,680 --> 00:27:19,400
to sound like the aunt How quickly can we replace

552
00:27:19,440 --> 00:27:22,200
the losses? How many ships can we mobilize in the

553
00:27:22,240 --> 00:27:25,680
next week. What are our largest weapons and have we

554
00:27:25,759 --> 00:27:29,279
considered using them? He answered all of them honestly. Then

555
00:27:29,319 --> 00:27:31,440
he stood in the silence that followed and waited to

556
00:27:31,440 --> 00:27:33,359
see if anyone was going to ask the question he

557
00:27:33,400 --> 00:27:37,160
actually thought mattered. Senator alone at Dar asked it. Laura

558
00:27:37,279 --> 00:27:38,920
was sixty three years old and had been in the

559
00:27:38,960 --> 00:27:41,599
Senate for thirty one of those years. She was thin,

560
00:27:41,839 --> 00:27:43,519
with sharp eyes, in the kind of face that had

561
00:27:43,519 --> 00:27:47,400
been handsome once and was now interesting instead, angula, watchful,

562
00:27:47,519 --> 00:27:50,720
deeply lined. She dressed simply for a senator, always in

563
00:27:50,720 --> 00:27:54,440
plain dark cloth, no ceremonial decorations except the small silver

564
00:27:54,480 --> 00:27:56,160
paint of her home district that she wore on her

565
00:27:56,240 --> 00:28:00,319
left shoulder. She was not popular in the Senate. She was, however,

566
00:28:00,359 --> 00:28:03,160
it respected, which was different and in many ways more useful.

567
00:28:03,680 --> 00:28:06,119
She had read Venture's report twice before the session began,

568
00:28:06,359 --> 00:28:08,359
not just the tactical summary that had been prepared for

569
00:28:08,400 --> 00:28:11,680
the senators, a full report, including the personal observations and

570
00:28:11,720 --> 00:28:14,640
including the translated message, including the description of the face

571
00:28:14,640 --> 00:28:16,920
in the screen. She had read all of it, and

572
00:28:17,000 --> 00:28:18,799
she had thought about it carefully, and then she had

573
00:28:18,799 --> 00:28:21,160
come to the Senate chamber with something specific to say.

574
00:28:21,799 --> 00:28:24,079
She waited and till the questions about fleet strength and

575
00:28:24,119 --> 00:28:27,559
weapons had exhausted themselves. She waited until the room had

576
00:28:27,599 --> 00:28:29,799
settled into the kind of silence that comes after a

577
00:28:29,799 --> 00:28:32,000
lot of noise. Ushered to the silence where people were

578
00:28:32,039 --> 00:28:35,200
beginning to realize that shouting hadn't solved anything. Then she

579
00:28:35,279 --> 00:28:37,559
requested the speaking floor and walked down to the center

580
00:28:37,599 --> 00:28:39,799
of the chamber and stood where Sarath Khan had stood.

581
00:28:40,359 --> 00:28:42,880
I want to talk about the signal, she said. The

582
00:28:42,960 --> 00:28:47,240
room shifted. A few senators look confused. She kept going

583
00:28:47,880 --> 00:28:51,079
before Admiral Harris opened fire. The unknown vessel was broadcasting

584
00:28:51,079 --> 00:28:55,880
all multiple frequencies. Our own analysts confirmed this. The broadcast

585
00:28:55,960 --> 00:28:59,200
was repeating on a regular cycle, clearly deliberate, clearly designed

586
00:28:59,200 --> 00:29:01,759
to be received. We could not translate it at the time,

587
00:29:01,799 --> 00:29:03,799
but given what we have now learned about the fragments

588
00:29:03,799 --> 00:29:07,000
of the civilization's language, Ourseno linguistics team has been working

589
00:29:07,039 --> 00:29:11,680
on it. She paused. Admiral Saath Khan, has that translation

590
00:29:11,759 --> 00:29:15,200
been completed? Saath Kah, standing to one side of the foe,

591
00:29:15,279 --> 00:29:18,839
now nodded slowly. It was completed this morning. He said,

592
00:29:19,400 --> 00:29:21,960
Hanau was planning to include it in the supplementary report.

593
00:29:22,640 --> 00:29:26,640
What does it say? Another pause? Sarath Kahan looked at

594
00:29:26,680 --> 00:29:29,279
the chamber for a moment, all those watching faces, and

595
00:29:29,319 --> 00:29:32,319
then he said it plainly. It says approximately, we are

596
00:29:32,359 --> 00:29:35,319
a vessel from a distant civilization. We have traveled a

597
00:29:35,319 --> 00:29:38,559
great distance and afar from home. We have no hostile intent.

598
00:29:39,279 --> 00:29:43,599
We would like to communicate peacefully. Please respond. The chamber

599
00:29:43,640 --> 00:29:47,799
was very quiet, Please respond, Lowayne repeated. May she let

600
00:29:47,799 --> 00:29:50,039
it sit in the air for a moment. They were

601
00:29:50,079 --> 00:29:53,319
asking to talk. Therefore we fired a single shot. They

602
00:29:53,319 --> 00:29:56,319
were asking to talk. In fact, they were asking to

603
00:29:56,319 --> 00:29:59,279
talk the entire time Admiral Harris was arranging his battle formation.

604
00:30:00,000 --> 00:30:02,359
They kept asking ride up until the moment our weapons

605
00:30:02,400 --> 00:30:05,960
hit them. She looked round the chamber slowly, and then

606
00:30:06,079 --> 00:30:09,880
only then beforet that they destroyed forty ships. Someone shouted

607
00:30:09,880 --> 00:30:13,880
from the upper gallery. Lawne didn't look up toward the voice. Yes,

608
00:30:13,920 --> 00:30:17,000
she said, after we shot at them first. After this spent,

609
00:30:17,039 --> 00:30:20,000
according to the sense of data, approximately forty minutes broadcasting

610
00:30:20,000 --> 00:30:22,599
a request for peaceful communication that we chose to ignore.

611
00:30:23,160 --> 00:30:26,240
I am not saying they are not dangerous. They clearly are.

612
00:30:27,000 --> 00:30:28,599
I am saying that when you look at the secrets

613
00:30:28,599 --> 00:30:31,119
of event honestley, which I am asking this chamber to do,

614
00:30:31,240 --> 00:30:33,640
the picture looks somewhat different than a simple act of regression.

615
00:30:34,079 --> 00:30:37,000
The murmuring in the chamber grew louder. She raised her

616
00:30:37,079 --> 00:30:40,039
voice lightly. I don't want to ask this body a question,

617
00:30:40,160 --> 00:30:42,960
A serious one, not about military strength of fleet numbers,

618
00:30:43,000 --> 00:30:45,640
A different kind of question. She moved to the displaced

619
00:30:45,680 --> 00:30:47,759
green and brought up the image of the Adamantine resolve,

620
00:30:47,799 --> 00:30:49,880
the battered hull, the scars, the mis snatched plate in

621
00:30:50,400 --> 00:30:53,839
look at the ship, look at it carefully. Our analyst

622
00:30:54,000 --> 00:30:56,960
estimated it is been traveling for a significant period. The

623
00:30:57,000 --> 00:30:59,119
condition of the hull, the number of repair cycles, a

624
00:30:59,160 --> 00:31:02,319
type of damage visible. Oh No, All of the points

625
00:31:02,319 --> 00:31:03,799
to a vessel that has been in deep space for

626
00:31:03,799 --> 00:31:07,359
an extremely long time, possibly years. She turned back to

627
00:31:07,400 --> 00:31:10,160
the chamber. This is not a scouting vessel ahead of

628
00:31:10,160 --> 00:31:13,039
an invision fleet. This is not a warship. Position at

629
00:31:13,039 --> 00:31:15,559
the edge of our territory is a show strength. This

630
00:31:15,759 --> 00:31:18,279
is a ship that is lost. We know this because

631
00:31:18,319 --> 00:31:21,079
they said so in broken, barely translated words to the

632
00:31:21,079 --> 00:31:23,119
occupant of an escape pot floating in the wreckage of

633
00:31:23,119 --> 00:31:26,799
forty of our vessels. They said, we are lost. Oh,

634
00:31:26,880 --> 00:31:29,880
we want to go home. Please. The silence that followed

635
00:31:29,920 --> 00:31:33,279
was different from the silence before, heavier, more thoughtful, and

636
00:31:33,359 --> 00:31:35,559
if I'm wrong, the rain said, more quietly. Now, and

637
00:31:35,640 --> 00:31:37,799
this is the advanced force of some vast armada than

638
00:31:37,839 --> 00:31:40,799
destroying this ship accomplishes nothing because the armad knows where

639
00:31:40,839 --> 00:31:43,359
we are now. They know because this ship was here

640
00:31:43,400 --> 00:31:45,759
and fought us and was never had from again. The

641
00:31:45,799 --> 00:31:48,160
message that sends is not the dominion is too powerful

642
00:31:48,200 --> 00:31:51,319
to attack. The message is the dominion destroys everything it

643
00:31:51,400 --> 00:31:55,720
encounters without asking questions First, she paused, if there is

644
00:31:55,759 --> 00:31:58,640
a civilization behind this vessel, one capable of building and

645
00:31:58,680 --> 00:32:00,880
deploying something like it, do we want them coming here

646
00:32:00,880 --> 00:32:03,319
with war in mind? What would we prefer to know

647
00:32:03,400 --> 00:32:06,319
they came here once and left peacefully. She stepped back

648
00:32:06,319 --> 00:32:09,160
from the display Awana I am asking for a vote

649
00:32:09,160 --> 00:32:11,960
to suspend the military response and attempt formal communication with

650
00:32:12,000 --> 00:32:15,880
the unknown vessel. The vote failed, not by a wide margin,

651
00:32:15,920 --> 00:32:19,000
but it failed forty one senators to thirty seven with

652
00:32:19,079 --> 00:32:22,680
nine abstentions. The chamber's fear was simply greater than its caution.

653
00:32:23,240 --> 00:32:26,160
Too many senators thought like soldiers rather than diplomats, and

654
00:32:26,240 --> 00:32:28,319
too many of those who might averted differently were too

655
00:32:28,319 --> 00:32:30,559
afraid of the emperor to do it. An Emperor of

656
00:32:30,559 --> 00:32:32,559
Othono's room and four had not come to the Senate

657
00:32:32,599 --> 00:32:35,519
session in person. He was ninety four years old and

658
00:32:35,599 --> 00:32:38,400
rarely left inner palace any more. But his voice had

659
00:32:38,400 --> 00:32:40,319
been prison for oath in the messages delivered to key

660
00:32:40,359 --> 00:32:43,559
senators before the session, in the whispered conversations in the corridors,

661
00:32:43,559 --> 00:32:45,000
in the simple fact that every one in the room

662
00:32:45,039 --> 00:32:48,519
knew what he wanted. He wanted the vessel destroyed. He

663
00:32:48,559 --> 00:32:51,279
wanted the threat eliminated. He was not a man who

664
00:32:51,279 --> 00:32:53,720
had maintained power for thirty years by accommodating things he

665
00:32:53,720 --> 00:32:56,119
didn't understand, and a ship that had killed forty of

666
00:32:56,119 --> 00:32:58,000
his worships was very high on the list of things

667
00:32:58,000 --> 00:33:01,680
he intended not to accommodate. Three full battle groups were authorized,

668
00:33:01,720 --> 00:33:04,319
three hundred ships drawn from multiple sectors, converging on the

669
00:33:04,359 --> 00:33:07,480
Veil Corridor, the largest single military deployment the Dominion had

670
00:33:07,480 --> 00:33:10,240
made in two centuries. Lawen warped out of the chamber

671
00:33:10,319 --> 00:33:13,000
after the vert with Senator Vasho, the young intelligence officer

672
00:33:13,039 --> 00:33:15,720
who had attended the session as an observer, at her side.

673
00:33:16,200 --> 00:33:18,119
They walked in silence for a moment through the wide

674
00:33:18,160 --> 00:33:21,680
stone corridor outside the chamber doors. They're making a mistake,

675
00:33:21,880 --> 00:33:26,960
Velshi said, yes, Lauren agreed. What do we do? Lauren

676
00:33:27,000 --> 00:33:30,400
looked at him sideways. He was young, twenty six maybe

677
00:33:30,440 --> 00:33:32,799
twenty seven, smart, careful as to the kind of person.

678
00:33:32,799 --> 00:33:35,839
The Intelligence Service attracted people who were good at looking

679
00:33:35,880 --> 00:33:38,480
at information and join honest conclusions, even when the honest

680
00:33:38,519 --> 00:33:41,519
conclusion was uncomfortable. We wait, she said, and we make

681
00:33:41,559 --> 00:33:43,960
sure that when the mistake becomes obvious to everyone else,

682
00:33:44,200 --> 00:33:47,400
we're ready with an alternative. Felsha was quiet for a moment.

683
00:33:48,160 --> 00:33:50,400
Do you think the vessel will arrive? Three hundred ships?

684
00:33:51,079 --> 00:33:53,680
Lauren thought about the image of the unknown ship, the scars,

685
00:33:53,720 --> 00:33:56,720
the repairs, the number of times it had clearly been

686
00:33:56,720 --> 00:33:59,240
through something terrible and come out the other side still moving.

687
00:34:00,039 --> 00:34:01,920
She thought about the message VN that had sent, the

688
00:34:01,960 --> 00:34:04,519
tired face and the screen, the broken translated words, the

689
00:34:04,559 --> 00:34:07,640
single word at the end. I think, she said, carefully,

690
00:34:07,640 --> 00:34:09,400
that whatever is on that ship has survived things we

691
00:34:09,400 --> 00:34:12,440
cannot imagine. I think it survived getting here somehow, which

692
00:34:12,480 --> 00:34:15,679
by our own navigator's assessment, should be impossible. I think

693
00:34:15,679 --> 00:34:19,000
it survived forty of our warships, She paused. Whether it

694
00:34:19,039 --> 00:34:22,239
can survive three hundred. I genuinely don't know. But I

695
00:34:22,280 --> 00:34:24,280
know that even if it can't, even if we destroy it,

696
00:34:24,320 --> 00:34:26,840
we will have gained nothing. Only made the situation worse.

697
00:34:27,559 --> 00:34:30,719
They reached the end of the corridor below the palace windows.

698
00:34:30,880 --> 00:34:33,840
Volkara went about its business, millions of lives flowing through

699
00:34:33,840 --> 00:34:36,559
their daily rhythms, completely unaware of what was being decided

700
00:34:36,599 --> 00:34:40,400
above them. The Emperor is afraid, Velshis said, MA, of

701
00:34:40,440 --> 00:34:43,320
course he is, Lauren said, he has been afraid for

702
00:34:43,360 --> 00:34:47,199
thirty years. Fear is how he governs. The problem is

703
00:34:47,199 --> 00:34:49,840
that FIA is a very pro strategy for this particular situation.

704
00:34:50,519 --> 00:34:52,840
She looked out the window at the city. Find me

705
00:34:52,880 --> 00:34:54,800
everything you can about the occupant of that escape pot.

706
00:34:54,840 --> 00:34:59,639
The censor officer, Belcher Velscha looked at her. Why because

707
00:34:59,639 --> 00:35:02,000
she saw the face on the screen, Lawn said, And

708
00:35:02,079 --> 00:35:04,440
she included a personal autovation in her report that nobody

709
00:35:04,480 --> 00:35:07,360
else seems to have noticed. And because everyone was too

710
00:35:07,360 --> 00:35:09,960
busy counting destroyed warships. She turned away from the window.

711
00:35:10,599 --> 00:35:13,679
She said, the being Luksa, not aggressive, not triumphants, sad,

712
00:35:14,360 --> 00:35:18,079
and then it set Please she met Velsha's eyes. I

713
00:35:18,119 --> 00:35:20,880
want to talk to her before the three hundred ships

714
00:35:20,920 --> 00:35:22,840
arrive at the veil. I want to know exactly what

715
00:35:22,880 --> 00:35:27,079
she saw. Meanwhile, three hundred warships were already moving. Fleet

716
00:35:27,119 --> 00:35:29,960
Emerald Drafha commanded the combined battle group from his flagship,

717
00:35:30,000 --> 00:35:33,159
the Velchar's Judgment and the largest worship in the Imperial Fleet.

718
00:35:33,800 --> 00:35:36,599
It was nearly kilometer long and carried weapons at couldkrack

719
00:35:36,639 --> 00:35:39,639
a mon. Draffor had commanded it for eight years, and

720
00:35:39,719 --> 00:35:41,519
in those eight years it had never fired an anger,

721
00:35:41,559 --> 00:35:44,039
because nothing had ever required it to. He was a

722
00:35:44,039 --> 00:35:47,440
careful man, methodical. He had read the report Group houses

723
00:35:47,480 --> 00:35:50,280
destruction three times, and he had spent considerable time studying

724
00:35:50,280 --> 00:35:52,519
every piece of data available in their own vessel's speed,

725
00:35:52,519 --> 00:35:54,400
its weapons, with its apparent Holse strength, the way it

726
00:35:54,440 --> 00:35:56,880
had selected targets during the engagement. He respected what he

727
00:35:56,880 --> 00:35:58,800
was looking at. He did not underestimate it. But three

728
00:35:58,840 --> 00:36:01,280
hundred ships was not fought ships, and Daffoa was not

729
00:36:01,320 --> 00:36:03,960
the kind of commander who who made the same mistake twice, or,

730
00:36:03,960 --> 00:36:06,159
in his case, made the same mistake that some one

731
00:36:06,159 --> 00:36:10,039
else had already made. Once his orders were clear, find

732
00:36:10,079 --> 00:36:13,519
the vessel, destroy it, but he sat at his command

733
00:36:13,559 --> 00:36:15,880
station as his fleet moved through space and thought about

734
00:36:15,880 --> 00:36:17,800
the one detail that had bothered him since he first

735
00:36:17,800 --> 00:36:20,760
read the engagement report, the way the unknown ship could

736
00:36:20,760 --> 00:36:23,400
stopped firing the moment the last dominion warship went dark

737
00:36:24,000 --> 00:36:27,480
immediately like a switch. A ship fighting for survival didn't

738
00:36:27,519 --> 00:36:30,920
stop like that. A ship fighting for survival kept firing

739
00:36:31,000 --> 00:36:33,639
until it was certain every threat was gone. A ship

740
00:36:33,639 --> 00:36:36,039
on an attack run didn't stop like that ear a

741
00:36:36,119 --> 00:36:39,320
ship on an attack run pressed its advantage. A ship

742
00:36:39,320 --> 00:36:42,039
that didn't want to fight stop exactly like that. He

743
00:36:42,119 --> 00:36:44,719
had not included this observation in any of his reports.

744
00:36:45,360 --> 00:36:48,159
He was a fleet admiral. His job was to follow

745
00:36:48,159 --> 00:36:51,199
his orders, not to analyze the psychology of alien vessels,

746
00:36:51,800 --> 00:36:54,400
and his orders were very clear. He looked at the

747
00:36:54,400 --> 00:36:56,679
star maps showing the veil corridor and the last known

748
00:36:56,719 --> 00:36:59,639
position of the unknown ship three days a current speed.

749
00:37:00,199 --> 00:37:02,639
He told himself he was ready for whatever he would find.

750
00:37:03,280 --> 00:37:06,960
He almost believed it. The Adamantine resolved detected the incoming

751
00:37:06,960 --> 00:37:10,199
fleet six hours before it arrived. That was the advantage

752
00:37:10,199 --> 00:37:12,599
of being alone in a relatively quiet region of spaces

753
00:37:12,599 --> 00:37:14,559
censes that had been built to scan across hundreds of

754
00:37:14,599 --> 00:37:17,599
millions of kilometers. There was no debris left from the

755
00:37:17,639 --> 00:37:20,480
previous battle. The results crew had spent the days since

756
00:37:20,480 --> 00:37:22,639
the engagement during what they always did after a fight,

757
00:37:22,840 --> 00:37:25,000
which was clean up, repair what could be repaired, and

758
00:37:25,039 --> 00:37:27,800
take stock of we things stood. The censor arrays in

759
00:37:27,800 --> 00:37:30,480
the port side had been replaced with backup punits from storage.

760
00:37:31,119 --> 00:37:34,480
The breach in section seven had been sealed properly, Reactive

761
00:37:34,480 --> 00:37:37,360
two had been tuned back into stable operation. The ship

762
00:37:37,440 --> 00:37:39,360
was not at full strength, but it was functional and

763
00:37:39,360 --> 00:37:42,519
its censors were very, very good. When the first long

764
00:37:42,599 --> 00:37:45,079
range contact appeared on the edge of the detection range,

765
00:37:45,119 --> 00:37:47,239
the watch officer noted it without alarm and began the

766
00:37:47,239 --> 00:37:51,639
standard process of characterizing the contact size, speed, heading, number

767
00:37:51,639 --> 00:37:56,159
of individual signatures. Three minutes later, when the characterization was complete,

768
00:37:56,199 --> 00:37:59,400
she called the captain. False arrived on the bridge already dressed.

769
00:38:00,079 --> 00:38:01,880
She had a habit of sleeping in her uniform when

770
00:38:01,880 --> 00:38:04,400
the ship was in any kind of uncertain situation, which

771
00:38:04,400 --> 00:38:07,039
meant she had been sleeping in her uniform almost continuously

772
00:38:07,079 --> 00:38:10,599
for two years. She came to the census station. He

773
00:38:10,639 --> 00:38:12,360
looked at the display and studded it for a while

774
00:38:12,400 --> 00:38:15,280
without speaking. The contacts were still far out, but the

775
00:38:15,320 --> 00:38:18,440
numbers were clear enough. The computer kept updating the count

776
00:38:18,440 --> 00:38:21,559
as more signatures resolved out of background noise. It was

777
00:38:21,599 --> 00:38:24,719
past three hundred and still going up. All senior staff

778
00:38:24,760 --> 00:38:29,000
to the bridge far said nah. They gathered within five minutes.

779
00:38:29,719 --> 00:38:32,079
Boss waited until they were all present and then turned

780
00:38:32,079 --> 00:38:34,440
to face them. And these were people she had served

781
00:38:34,440 --> 00:38:36,559
with for years, in some cases more than a decade.

782
00:38:37,159 --> 00:38:40,800
She trusted them completely. They trusted her. That trust had

783
00:38:40,840 --> 00:38:42,400
been built over a long time and for a lot

784
00:38:42,480 --> 00:38:44,599
of difficult situations, and it was part of why the

785
00:38:44,599 --> 00:38:48,400
results crew functioned the way they did, quietly, efficiently, without panic,

786
00:38:48,440 --> 00:38:51,559
even when panic was entirely reasonable. This was a moment

787
00:38:51,599 --> 00:38:54,679
when panic was entirely reasonable. She told them what the

788
00:38:54,719 --> 00:38:57,920
censor showed, so she told them they estimated arrival time.

789
00:38:58,559 --> 00:39:01,320
She told them the size of a force. She watched

790
00:39:01,320 --> 00:39:03,639
their faces as she spoke and saw what she expected,

791
00:39:04,239 --> 00:39:07,440
not panic, but a tightening, a stillness, the look of

792
00:39:07,480 --> 00:39:11,280
people doing rapid calculations and not finding comfortable answers. Then

793
00:39:11,280 --> 00:39:13,199
she told them what she intended to do about it.

794
00:39:13,840 --> 00:39:17,039
There was a silence after she finished her First officer

795
00:39:17,239 --> 00:39:21,719
Rickou spoke, first, you want a whole position, yes, and

796
00:39:21,800 --> 00:39:26,920
powered down weapons, not entirely stand by only, but yes,

797
00:39:27,719 --> 00:39:32,519
e essentially against three hundred chips against three hundred ships.

798
00:39:33,199 --> 00:39:36,880
Another silence. Rica looked at the censor display, then back

799
00:39:36,920 --> 00:39:39,199
at her. He had a quality she valued in a

800
00:39:39,239 --> 00:39:43,480
first officer, he thought before he argued, and when he argued,

801
00:39:43,599 --> 00:39:45,960
he did it because he had a real point, not

802
00:39:46,079 --> 00:39:48,960
because he was afraid. We have theme c rounds and

803
00:39:48,960 --> 00:39:51,079
missiles for maybe one more engagement at the scale of

804
00:39:51,119 --> 00:39:54,880
the last one, he said. Maybe after that were down

805
00:39:54,920 --> 00:39:58,239
to point defense, a maneuvering. I know. So if this

806
00:39:58,320 --> 00:40:00,920
doesn't work, If this doesn't work, fight, she said, And

807
00:40:01,000 --> 00:40:03,599
we probably lose. But we've known for a while that

808
00:40:03,639 --> 00:40:06,239
going home wasn't going to be easy. Dying in a

809
00:40:06,239 --> 00:40:08,480
fight with three hundred alien worships is not outside the

810
00:40:08,559 --> 00:40:10,760
range of what I considered when we accepted this posting.

811
00:40:11,320 --> 00:40:13,519
She looked around at all of them. What I'm not

812
00:40:13,559 --> 00:40:15,159
willing to do is start a fight when I don't

813
00:40:15,199 --> 00:40:18,679
have to. We tried talking before, they didn't let us.

814
00:40:19,320 --> 00:40:23,920
We're going to try again, she paused. Any objections, there

815
00:40:23,960 --> 00:40:26,920
were none. There was some unhappiness in the room, but

816
00:40:26,960 --> 00:40:30,519
nobody objected. They were professionals, and she was their captain.

817
00:40:31,119 --> 00:40:33,599
And more than that, they knew she was right. Every

818
00:40:33,599 --> 00:40:35,599
one of them had been thinking the same things she had,

819
00:40:35,639 --> 00:40:37,360
that the last fight had not been what any of

820
00:40:37,360 --> 00:40:39,280
them wanted, and that doing it again on a scale

821
00:40:39,320 --> 00:40:41,320
seven times larger would be something a lot of them

822
00:40:41,400 --> 00:40:44,800
might not walk away from. Honey, good Man, she said, Oh,

823
00:40:44,880 --> 00:40:48,679
but what's your best current translation database? The navigator, who

824
00:40:48,679 --> 00:40:50,679
had been quietly the second busiest person in the ship

825
00:40:50,719 --> 00:40:53,199
for two years after vas herself, pulled up a screen.

826
00:40:53,719 --> 00:40:56,320
We recovered a significant amount of communication data from the

827
00:40:56,360 --> 00:41:00,840
last engagement. My language algorithms have been running continuously. I

828
00:41:00,880 --> 00:41:03,559
can now produce rough but functional translations in their primary

829
00:41:03,639 --> 00:41:07,199
language and receive their transmissions with about sixty percent comprehension accuracy.

830
00:41:07,639 --> 00:41:10,760
He paused, It's not perfect, but it's a real conversation,

831
00:41:11,000 --> 00:41:14,760
not just fragments. Voss looked at him for a moment. God,

832
00:41:14,920 --> 00:41:17,760
she said again, and meant itt more this time, prepare

833
00:41:17,760 --> 00:41:21,639
a broadcast. I'll wight it. We'll start transmitting the moment

834
00:41:21,679 --> 00:41:25,639
they're within communication range. The broadcast went up four iours later,

835
00:41:25,719 --> 00:41:28,480
when the first contacts were close enough for real time communication.

836
00:41:29,079 --> 00:41:32,199
It was simple. Voss had written it herself, with Olbey's

837
00:41:32,199 --> 00:41:34,519
help on the translation, and she had gone through six

838
00:41:34,599 --> 00:41:37,519
drafts before she was satisfied. She wanted it to be

839
00:41:37,559 --> 00:41:41,199
clear without being weak, honest without being frightening. She wanted

840
00:41:41,239 --> 00:41:43,480
who ever received it to understand exactly what they were

841
00:41:43,519 --> 00:41:45,800
dealing with, Not a vessel that was begging for mercy,

842
00:41:45,880 --> 00:41:47,599
and not a vessel that was threatening them, but a

843
00:41:47,639 --> 00:41:50,199
vessel that was making a reasonable choice. In explaining why,

844
00:41:50,800 --> 00:41:53,719
it's aid, this is the ennsk Adamantine resolve. We know

845
00:41:53,800 --> 00:41:57,199
you are coming. We have detected your fleet. We are

846
00:41:57,199 --> 00:42:00,440
not running, we are not preparing to fire. We have

847
00:42:00,519 --> 00:42:03,599
powered our weapons to minimum stand by level only. We

848
00:42:03,639 --> 00:42:06,800
are holding our position. We came to this region by accident.

849
00:42:07,480 --> 00:42:09,599
We are far from our home, farther than we can

850
00:42:09,639 --> 00:42:12,239
easily explain, and we have been searching for a way

851
00:42:12,239 --> 00:42:15,239
back for nearly two years. We have no territory here,

852
00:42:15,920 --> 00:42:18,400
We have no claim here. We want nothing for me

853
00:42:18,440 --> 00:42:20,639
except the chance to speak and, if possible, your help

854
00:42:20,639 --> 00:42:23,199
in finding our way home. We fought the last fleet

855
00:42:23,239 --> 00:42:25,199
because they fired on us first, after we had spent

856
00:42:25,320 --> 00:42:28,920
forty minutes asking to communicate peacefully. We did not enjoy it.

857
00:42:29,440 --> 00:42:32,079
We do not want to fight again. We are one ship,

858
00:42:32,199 --> 00:42:34,639
one crew. We have people here who want to go

859
00:42:34,719 --> 00:42:38,519
home to their families. We are waiting. Please talk to us.

860
00:42:39,039 --> 00:42:42,000
She recorded it in her own voice itcher, and Obey

861
00:42:42,039 --> 00:42:44,199
ran it through the translation software so it played in

862
00:42:44,199 --> 00:42:48,000
the Dominion language. Then they broadcasted on every frequency they had,

863
00:42:48,079 --> 00:42:50,119
repeating on a ten minute cycle, and they held their

864
00:42:50,159 --> 00:42:53,880
position and waited. The ship sat still in space. The

865
00:42:53,960 --> 00:42:56,719
crew went to their stations and maintained readness without engaging

866
00:42:56,760 --> 00:42:59,719
weapons locks. In the mess hall, people ate quietly and

867
00:42:59,719 --> 00:43:03,559
spoke low voices. In engineering, the team ran continuous checks

868
00:43:03,559 --> 00:43:06,079
on the reactor, only making sure everything was as stable

869
00:43:06,119 --> 00:43:09,079
as possible. In a small medical bay, the ship's stopped

870
00:43:09,079 --> 00:43:11,639
to inventory supplies with the calm efficiency of someone who

871
00:43:11,679 --> 00:43:14,199
was preparing for possibilities they were choosing not to name out.

872
00:43:14,239 --> 00:43:17,239
Lad In the navigation room, Obe sat at his station

873
00:43:17,280 --> 00:43:19,480
and ran calculations that he had been running for twenty

874
00:43:19,480 --> 00:43:22,199
two months. He ran them because the captain had told

875
00:43:22,239 --> 00:43:23,840
him to keep looking, and he was the kind of

876
00:43:23,880 --> 00:43:25,599
person who did what he was told when the person

877
00:43:25,599 --> 00:43:28,440
telling him had earned his trust completely. He ran them

878
00:43:28,440 --> 00:43:30,960
also because the alternative, accepting that they would never find

879
00:43:30,960 --> 00:43:33,360
a way home, was not something he was prepared to accept.

880
00:43:34,039 --> 00:43:38,039
Not yet, maybe not ever. On the bridge force sat

881
00:43:38,079 --> 00:43:40,119
in her command chair and drank coffee and watched the

882
00:43:40,159 --> 00:43:43,559
contacts on her sensor display move closer. Fleet Admiral Draft

883
00:43:43,679 --> 00:43:45,960
four received the broadcast when his fleet was still two

884
00:43:46,039 --> 00:43:48,719
ius out. He was at his command station when it

885
00:43:48,760 --> 00:43:51,639
came through. Translated him perfect in places, but clear enough

886
00:43:51,639 --> 00:43:54,840
in its meaning. He listened to it twice. Then he

887
00:43:54,880 --> 00:43:57,039
sat very still for a moment, which was something his

888
00:43:57,119 --> 00:43:59,800
bridge crew recognized as the admiral doing serious thinking and

889
00:43:59,840 --> 00:44:02,360
no k not to interrupt. He pulled up the date

890
00:44:02,400 --> 00:44:05,159
on the battle Group Harris engagement. He had read it

891
00:44:05,199 --> 00:44:08,039
many times before, but he looked at the specific timeline again,

892
00:44:08,559 --> 00:44:10,639
the broadcast that had been going out before the fight,

893
00:44:10,719 --> 00:44:13,039
to the forty minutes of attempted communication that Harris had

894
00:44:13,119 --> 00:44:15,480
chosen to ignore, the way the firing had sopped immediately

895
00:44:15,519 --> 00:44:18,079
when the last dominion ship was disabled. He put that

896
00:44:18,159 --> 00:44:21,159
alongside the censor reading now coming in from the resolves

897
00:44:21,159 --> 00:44:26,559
current position, stationary weapons on minimum standby, exactly as the

898
00:44:26,599 --> 00:44:29,679
broadcast claimed. A ship that was preparing to fight three

899
00:44:29,760 --> 00:44:32,880
hundred vessels did not power down its weapons. It charged

900
00:44:32,920 --> 00:44:35,000
everything it had en tried to pick a most advantageous

901
00:44:35,039 --> 00:44:38,159
moment to strike It definitely did not sit still and

902
00:44:38,239 --> 00:44:41,639
broadcast its position and asked to talk. He called his

903
00:44:41,719 --> 00:44:44,000
senior staff to the briefing room, which was unusual because

904
00:44:44,039 --> 00:44:47,000
senior staff briefings were typically held before engagements, not two

905
00:44:47,039 --> 00:44:50,440
IROs up from them. He showed them the broadcasts. He

906
00:44:50,519 --> 00:44:53,599
showed them the sense of readings. He asked for assessments.

907
00:44:54,239 --> 00:44:57,599
The assessments were mixed. His weapons officer voted was a trick,

908
00:44:57,760 --> 00:45:00,280
a way of buying time, perhaps or throwing the feed

909
00:45:00,280 --> 00:45:04,000
into a specific formation. His intelligence officer thought the broadcast

910
00:45:04,119 --> 00:45:06,760
was genuine, but that it didn't matter because their orders

911
00:45:06,760 --> 00:45:10,000
were clear. His second in command, a veteran named Korrath,

912
00:45:10,039 --> 00:45:12,440
said nothing for a long time and then said, Admiral,

913
00:45:12,599 --> 00:45:15,400
we have three hundred ships and they have won. If

914
00:45:15,400 --> 00:45:17,239
this is a trick, we have more than enough strength

915
00:45:17,239 --> 00:45:19,760
to handle whatever they do. If it's not a trick

916
00:45:20,440 --> 00:45:23,119
on our end, we fire anyway, we will have destroyed

917
00:45:23,119 --> 00:45:25,480
a vessel that was asking to talk after they already

918
00:45:25,480 --> 00:45:27,719
asked to talk once before, and we send forty ships

919
00:45:27,719 --> 00:45:31,360
to shoot at them instead of answering. Cores paused. I'm

920
00:45:31,360 --> 00:45:34,719
not sure which of those possibilities concerns me more. Draftford

921
00:45:34,719 --> 00:45:37,239
dismissed the briefing and went back to his station. The

922
00:45:37,280 --> 00:45:39,519
fleet arrived at the Resolves position and spread out in

923
00:45:39,559 --> 00:45:42,559
a vast encircle information three hundred warships forming a complete

924
00:45:42,559 --> 00:45:45,760
sphere around a single human vessel. On every weapon system,

925
00:45:45,840 --> 00:45:48,760
charged every target, and computer locked and waiting. It was

926
00:45:48,800 --> 00:45:52,719
no overwhelming display of force. It was, by any military measurement,

927
00:45:52,760 --> 00:45:54,760
an arrangement of power that should have ended any thought

928
00:45:54,760 --> 00:45:58,119
of resistance before it began. The Adamantine Resolved sat in

929
00:45:58,119 --> 00:46:01,280
the center of the sphere and did nothing. It didn't move,

930
00:46:01,960 --> 00:46:06,039
it didn't charge weapons, It continued broadcasting its message on repeat,

931
00:46:06,039 --> 00:46:08,559
and it waited. Draffer looked at it on his main

932
00:46:08,599 --> 00:46:11,960
display for a long time. One he thought about his orders.

933
00:46:12,639 --> 00:46:16,840
They were very clear. Find the vessel, destroy it. He

934
00:46:16,880 --> 00:46:19,159
thought about the detail that had bothered him from the beginning,

935
00:46:19,639 --> 00:46:21,440
the way the weapons had stopped, the moment the last

936
00:46:21,440 --> 00:46:24,920
Haire's ship went dark, a switch being turned off. He

937
00:46:25,000 --> 00:46:27,800
thought about Chorras's words in the briefing room. He thought

938
00:46:27,800 --> 00:46:30,440
about the word his intelligence officer had shown him translated

939
00:46:30,480 --> 00:46:32,199
from the message that had been sent to the escape

940
00:46:32,199 --> 00:46:36,199
pod survivor, single word, the last one in the message

941
00:46:36,960 --> 00:46:39,599
that He had looked at the original recording of that communication,

942
00:46:40,280 --> 00:46:43,000
something very few people had seen. He had watched the

943
00:46:43,039 --> 00:46:46,800
alien face on the screen, the tired eyes, the careful

944
00:46:46,800 --> 00:46:51,760
expression please. He pressed the communicator on his console, open

945
00:46:51,760 --> 00:46:57,239
a channel. He said, all frequencies translation active. He paused

946
00:46:57,840 --> 00:47:01,159
and record everything. There was a brief silence on the bridge.

947
00:47:01,760 --> 00:47:04,480
His communications officer looked up at him for just a moment,

948
00:47:04,679 --> 00:47:07,519
not questioning, He just noting, and then activated the system

949
00:47:08,159 --> 00:47:11,199
channel open. Admiral Daffa looked at the image of the

950
00:47:11,239 --> 00:47:14,280
single ship on his display, a battered, scarred, ancient looking

951
00:47:14,360 --> 00:47:16,679
vessel surrounded by three hundred of the finest worships in

952
00:47:16,719 --> 00:47:19,639
the dominion. It looked in an odd way, like a

953
00:47:19,760 --> 00:47:21,639
very old animal that had wandered into a place it

954
00:47:21,679 --> 00:47:23,880
didn't belong and was simply standing at grant with the

955
00:47:23,920 --> 00:47:26,360
dignity it had no right to have. He found that

956
00:47:26,400 --> 00:47:28,920
he did not want to fire at it. He found that,

957
00:47:29,000 --> 00:47:31,119
in more than almost anything he could remember, he did

958
00:47:31,199 --> 00:47:33,000
not want to be the person who gave that order.

959
00:47:33,599 --> 00:47:36,400
This is fleet Admiral Draffer of the Imperial Dominion, he said,

960
00:47:36,480 --> 00:47:38,599
And his voice came out steady and careful the way

961
00:47:38,639 --> 00:47:41,199
he spoke when he meant every word. I have received

962
00:47:41,199 --> 00:47:44,119
your transmission. I have read the record of your previous

963
00:47:44,159 --> 00:47:48,159
communication with our forces. He paused. I am told my

964
00:47:48,280 --> 00:47:51,679
orders or to destroy your vessel. He paused again. I

965
00:47:51,679 --> 00:47:54,000
am going to deviate from those orders in one respect.

966
00:47:54,679 --> 00:47:57,159
I am going to speak with you. First. He waited

967
00:47:57,159 --> 00:47:59,039
for the transmission to lay, to carry his words, and

968
00:47:59,079 --> 00:48:01,960
for the reply to come back. Tell me about yourself,

969
00:48:02,599 --> 00:48:05,159
Tell me where you are from, Tell me, honesty, what

970
00:48:05,199 --> 00:48:09,039
you're doing here. I am lessening. The resolve was quiet

971
00:48:09,079 --> 00:48:11,039
for the seven second it took the signal to travel

972
00:48:11,079 --> 00:48:13,880
and come back. Then a voice came through the channel,

973
00:48:13,880 --> 00:48:16,840
the human voice translated into Dominion language by assistant that

974
00:48:16,880 --> 00:48:19,360
had clearly been assembled with great effort from limited data.

975
00:48:19,920 --> 00:48:21,880
The voice was rough and tired, and something in the

976
00:48:21,920 --> 00:48:24,559
cadence of it, even translated, even filter for an alien

977
00:48:24,559 --> 00:48:27,559
translation algorithm, carried a quality that Draffa recognized from a

978
00:48:27,639 --> 00:48:32,679
lifetime of listening to soldiers. It was honesty, plain and complicated, honesty,

979
00:48:33,239 --> 00:48:35,239
the voice of someone who was simply too tired to

980
00:48:35,280 --> 00:48:38,039
be anything other than direct. My name is Captain A

981
00:48:38,079 --> 00:48:40,719
luh of Os, The voice said. We come from a

982
00:48:40,719 --> 00:48:43,320
galaxy cold, the Milky Way, in which is approximately two

983
00:48:43,360 --> 00:48:46,039
point three million light years from here. We entered a

984
00:48:46,079 --> 00:48:48,440
spatial anomaly that brought us here by accident twenty two

985
00:48:48,480 --> 00:48:50,280
months ago, and we have been looking for our way

986
00:48:50,280 --> 00:48:53,519
home ever since. Pause. We are a crew of two

987
00:48:53,599 --> 00:48:57,679
hundred sixty three people. We have sinedists, engineers, soldiers, a

988
00:48:57,719 --> 00:48:59,800
medical team, and a navigator who has not slept a

989
00:48:59,800 --> 00:49:01,559
full light in almost two years, trying to find a

990
00:49:01,639 --> 00:49:05,440
way back. Another pause, shorter this time. We have not

991
00:49:05,519 --> 00:49:07,880
come here to harm any one. We do not want

992
00:49:07,920 --> 00:49:11,079
your territory, we do not understand your politics, and we

993
00:49:11,119 --> 00:49:14,199
have no interest in your wars. We want navigational data

994
00:49:14,199 --> 00:49:16,199
that might help us find a slight space anomally that

995
00:49:16,280 --> 00:49:19,159
leads back toward our own galaxy, and then we want

996
00:49:19,199 --> 00:49:21,920
to go home. The bridge of the Volcio's judgment was

997
00:49:21,920 --> 00:49:26,039
completely silent. I understand you of three hundred warships surrounding us,

998
00:49:26,239 --> 00:49:29,800
was continued, I understand those ships of orders to destroy us.

999
00:49:30,519 --> 00:49:33,840
I am asking ye personally to consider an alternative. A

1000
00:49:33,880 --> 00:49:37,239
long pause. My crew as families, children, some of them

1001
00:49:37,800 --> 00:49:39,960
parents waiting at how not knowing what happened to us.

1002
00:49:40,599 --> 00:49:44,639
Her voice didn't change, it stayed steady, professional, but the

1003
00:49:44,679 --> 00:49:47,519
weight behind the words was impossible to miss. We just

1004
00:49:47,559 --> 00:49:50,199
want to go home, Admiral. That is the beginning and

1005
00:49:50,199 --> 00:49:52,800
the end of it. We want to go home. The

1006
00:49:52,840 --> 00:49:56,119
signal went quiet. Draffer sat at his command station and

1007
00:49:56,159 --> 00:49:59,239
said nothing for thirty seconds. Then he said, keep the

1008
00:49:59,320 --> 00:50:03,760
channel open. Watch I'll respond. Shortly, he stood up. He

1009
00:50:03,840 --> 00:50:05,599
walked to the observation window on the side of his

1010
00:50:05,679 --> 00:50:09,320
bridge and looked out at the encircle ship, that small, scarred,

1011
00:50:09,320 --> 00:50:11,639
stubborn shape in the middle of three hundred worships, sitting

1012
00:50:11,679 --> 00:50:16,599
perfectly still, waiting two hundred sixty three people children back home.

1013
00:50:17,239 --> 00:50:20,039
A navigator who hadn't slept properly in almost two years,

1014
00:50:20,679 --> 00:50:23,639
he thought about his own family on Bocar, his daughter,

1015
00:50:23,760 --> 00:50:25,800
who was fourteen and wanted to join the fleet when

1016
00:50:25,800 --> 00:50:28,280
she grew up his wife, who complained that he was

1017
00:50:28,320 --> 00:50:30,679
never home enough. He thought about what it meant to

1018
00:50:30,719 --> 00:50:35,239
be lost, not temporarily, not inconveniently, but genuinely, profoundly, impossibly

1019
00:50:35,320 --> 00:50:38,280
lost two million light years from home in a galaxy

1020
00:50:38,280 --> 00:50:41,320
he stumbled into by accident, surrounded by civilizations that kept

1021
00:50:41,320 --> 00:50:43,880
trying to shoot at you. He went back to his station.

1022
00:50:44,559 --> 00:50:48,239
This is Admiral Draffer, he said into the channel, Captain Voss.

1023
00:50:48,280 --> 00:50:50,079
I'm going to ask my fleet to stand down from

1024
00:50:50,079 --> 00:50:52,920
weapons ready status. And this is not an order I

1025
00:50:52,920 --> 00:50:55,079
have authorization to give, and I expect I will have

1026
00:50:55,119 --> 00:50:57,760
to answer for it, but I am giving it. He paused,

1027
00:50:58,440 --> 00:51:01,400
I would like to continue this conversay. There are people

1028
00:51:01,400 --> 00:51:04,039
in my government who need to hear what you just said. Man,

1029
00:51:04,280 --> 00:51:06,880
If you will give me your patience, and I understand

1030
00:51:06,920 --> 00:51:09,599
that asking for patients from someone surrounded by three hundred

1031
00:51:09,599 --> 00:51:12,719
warships as a considerable request, I will do everything in

1032
00:51:12,760 --> 00:51:15,719
my authority to insure you receive a fair hearing. Another

1033
00:51:15,760 --> 00:51:19,760
seven second delay, then Voss's voice came back, still steady,

1034
00:51:19,800 --> 00:51:22,519
still tired, but something in it had shifted just slightly,

1035
00:51:22,679 --> 00:51:26,000
just enough to hear if you were listening carefully. Thank you, Admiral,

1036
00:51:26,039 --> 00:51:29,920
she said, go, We're not going anywhere. The order came

1037
00:51:29,920 --> 00:51:33,639
from the Imperial Palace within four hours. Fleet Admiral Draffer

1038
00:51:33,760 --> 00:51:36,960
was to resume his original orders immediately. The vessel was

1039
00:51:36,960 --> 00:51:40,000
to be destroyed. Any further delay was considered an act

1040
00:51:40,039 --> 00:51:42,920
of insubordination, and Draffo was informed that a relief commander

1041
00:51:42,960 --> 00:51:44,920
was being dispatched to take his place if he refused

1042
00:51:44,920 --> 00:51:48,440
to comply. Draffer read the order. He set it aside

1043
00:51:48,440 --> 00:51:51,159
on his council. Then he went back to his conversation

1044
00:51:51,239 --> 00:51:54,320
with Captain Voss Whank. They had been talking for four

1045
00:51:54,360 --> 00:51:57,480
hours by then, a real conversation, slow because of the

1046
00:51:57,480 --> 00:52:01,280
transmission delay and the imperfect translation. But ja Vas had

1047
00:52:01,280 --> 00:52:03,840
told him about humanity, not in a formal way, not

1048
00:52:03,920 --> 00:52:05,920
like a prepared speech, but in the way of someone

1049
00:52:05,960 --> 00:52:09,000
answering direct questions honestly, because they had decided that honesty

1050
00:52:09,079 --> 00:52:12,199
was the only strategy left. She had told him about Earth,

1051
00:52:12,239 --> 00:52:14,719
about the wars humanity had fought among themselves before they

1052
00:52:14,760 --> 00:52:17,599
reached the stars, about the wars they had fought after,

1053
00:52:17,679 --> 00:52:19,920
about the things they had encountered in their own galaxy

1054
00:52:19,920 --> 00:52:22,239
that had nearly destroyed them, and how they had survived

1055
00:52:22,239 --> 00:52:26,280
them anyway. Draffer had asked direct questions and received direct answers,

1056
00:52:26,360 --> 00:52:28,599
and the picture that had emerged was unlike anything he

1057
00:52:28,639 --> 00:52:33,440
had expected. Humanity was not, by his people's standards, especially large.

1058
00:52:33,519 --> 00:52:36,840
The territory in their own galaxy was not vast, their

1059
00:52:36,840 --> 00:52:40,760
population was not enormous, and their technology was advanced, but

1060
00:52:40,800 --> 00:52:44,199
not in ways that suggested an ancient, settled civilization. It

1061
00:52:44,280 --> 00:52:46,400
was the technology of a species that had been repeatedly

1062
00:52:46,440 --> 00:52:48,599
pushed through its limits and had responded each time by

1063
00:52:48,599 --> 00:52:51,800
working harder and building stronger and refusing to stop. What

1064
00:52:51,840 --> 00:52:54,800
they had in extraordinary quantities was stubbornness and adaptability, and

1065
00:52:54,840 --> 00:52:57,199
a very specific quality of that Draffa found difficult to

1066
00:52:57,280 --> 00:53:00,280
name exactly, a kind of forward, looking at him nation

1067
00:53:00,320 --> 00:53:02,639
that expressed itself not as aggression but as a refusal

1068
00:53:02,679 --> 00:53:05,679
to accept that things couldn't be made better, a refusal

1069
00:53:05,679 --> 00:53:08,400
to give up. Not the fearlessness of something that had

1070
00:53:08,440 --> 00:53:10,800
never known danger, but the hard and come of something

1071
00:53:10,800 --> 00:53:12,760
that had been afraid many times and had learned to

1072
00:53:12,800 --> 00:53:15,599
work through it. He had been a soldier his whole life.

1073
00:53:16,159 --> 00:53:18,199
He knew what real strength looked like and this was

1074
00:53:18,280 --> 00:53:21,199
real strength. He read the relief order again, then he

1075
00:53:21,199 --> 00:53:24,519
put it down again. Corath, he said, his second in

1076
00:53:24,559 --> 00:53:28,480
command appeared at a sighed immediately, Admiral, what's the current status

1077
00:53:28,480 --> 00:53:33,320
of communication links with Oolkara stand of relay? All channels open? Good?

1078
00:53:34,000 --> 00:53:36,280
I want you to prepare a full transmission for Senator

1079
00:53:36,320 --> 00:53:39,519
Lawn after his office. Everything we've discussed with the resolve,

1080
00:53:39,559 --> 00:53:44,480
the full record unedited, every word. Send it now, I

1081
00:53:44,599 --> 00:53:47,840
before anything else changes. Corap was quiet for a moment.

1082
00:53:48,599 --> 00:53:51,679
That will be viewed as going around the Emperor's office. Yes,

1083
00:53:51,800 --> 00:53:55,559
Draffor said it will be. Korf looked at him for

1084
00:53:55,599 --> 00:53:58,400
a moment, then he nodded once and went to do it.

1085
00:53:59,159 --> 00:54:01,519
Senator o' lawn had not left a Senate district since

1086
00:54:01,559 --> 00:54:04,199
the fail vote. She had set up a working space

1087
00:54:04,199 --> 00:54:06,280
in her offices, and she had been sleeping in a

1088
00:54:06,360 --> 00:54:08,039
chair because she didn't want to be far from her

1089
00:54:08,039 --> 00:54:11,440
communication terminals. One of Velschow had been with her most

1090
00:54:11,440 --> 00:54:13,880
of that time. He had leaved. He hadn't taken in

1091
00:54:13,920 --> 00:54:16,039
two years, and he spent it sitting across from her,

1092
00:54:16,079 --> 00:54:17,880
working through the data they had trying to find a

1093
00:54:17,920 --> 00:54:20,119
path through the political situation that didn't end with three

1094
00:54:20,159 --> 00:54:22,920
hundred worships destroying something that didn't deserve to be destroyed.

1095
00:54:23,480 --> 00:54:25,239
Vena had come to see them on the second day.

1096
00:54:25,840 --> 00:54:29,039
The young Center officer had been debriefed by military intelligence

1097
00:54:29,079 --> 00:54:31,920
for fourteen years following her rescue here, and she had

1098
00:54:31,920 --> 00:54:35,119
been placed on administrative leave, not quite punishment, but clearly

1099
00:54:35,159 --> 00:54:38,320
not trust either. While the events she had witnessed were assessed,

1100
00:54:38,480 --> 00:54:40,800
she had been told clearly, if not explicity, that her

1101
00:54:40,840 --> 00:54:44,639
personal observations were not relevant to the military analysis. She

1102
00:54:44,679 --> 00:54:47,320
had decided that they were relevant to someone else's analysis.

1103
00:54:48,039 --> 00:54:50,480
She sat in Lareen's office and told the senator everything

1104
00:54:50,519 --> 00:54:53,079
she had seen, not the sense of data that was

1105
00:54:53,079 --> 00:54:55,960
in the report, the things that weren't in the report.

1106
00:54:56,519 --> 00:54:59,320
The waitership had moved after the battle, slowly, carefully, like

1107
00:54:59,360 --> 00:55:02,599
something that was to the signal that had kept broadcasting

1108
00:55:02,599 --> 00:55:05,519
even while the fleet was arranging to attack the face

1109
00:55:05,559 --> 00:55:08,880
on the screen the word at the end. Lauren had

1110
00:55:08,880 --> 00:55:11,840
listened to all of it without interrupting. When venture finish,

1111
00:55:11,920 --> 00:55:14,159
the Center had sat very still for a while, and

1112
00:55:14,239 --> 00:55:16,280
then had said, quietly, you made the right choice coming

1113
00:55:16,280 --> 00:55:19,239
here now. On the third day, the transmission from Admiral

1114
00:55:19,320 --> 00:55:22,760
Draffer arrived. Lauren read it in full, all of it,

1115
00:55:22,840 --> 00:55:25,880
the conversation with Valse, the questions and answers, the complete

1116
00:55:25,880 --> 00:55:28,199
record of four iyos of talking between a Dominion fleet

1117
00:55:28,239 --> 00:55:30,639
admiral and the captain of the most isolated vessel Lorna

1118
00:55:30,639 --> 00:55:33,239
had ever heard of. She read it once quickly, and

1119
00:55:33,320 --> 00:55:35,920
then went back and read it again, slowly, paying attention

1120
00:55:35,960 --> 00:55:39,239
to every exchange. Then she went to the Senate. The

1121
00:55:39,280 --> 00:55:42,079
second session was different from the first. Partly it was

1122
00:55:42,159 --> 00:55:45,719
Draffer's transmission. Lauren had it distributed to every senator before

1123
00:55:45,719 --> 00:55:48,079
decision began, and the content of a change the room

1124
00:55:48,119 --> 00:55:50,519
in ways that were hard to define precisely but impossible

1125
00:55:50,519 --> 00:55:53,639
to miss. A flat military report about an alien ship

1126
00:55:53,679 --> 00:55:57,239
destroying forty warships was one thing. Four iOS of conversation

1127
00:55:57,320 --> 00:55:59,599
with a lost crew asking for help finding their way

1128
00:55:59,599 --> 00:56:03,559
home was something else. Entirely. Partly it was Ventha. Lauren

1129
00:56:03,599 --> 00:56:05,719
had brought her to the session as a witness, which

1130
00:56:05,760 --> 00:56:09,039
was unusual but not unprecedented. Aunt the young officer, stood

1131
00:56:09,039 --> 00:56:11,800
at the speaker's position and answered questions with the same precise,

1132
00:56:11,960 --> 00:56:14,599
factual style she used when filing center reports. But the

1133
00:56:14,599 --> 00:56:17,239
facts she was conveying were not numbers and technical readings.

1134
00:56:17,880 --> 00:56:20,599
She described the face on the screen. She described to

1135
00:56:20,639 --> 00:56:23,119
broadcast that had been going out before the battle, the

1136
00:56:23,199 --> 00:56:26,599
request to communicate that nobody had answered. She described the

1137
00:56:26,599 --> 00:56:28,639
word at the end of the transmission, monering the way

1138
00:56:28,719 --> 00:56:30,280
she had felt sitting in that skip pod in the

1139
00:56:30,280 --> 00:56:33,480
wreckage of forty ships, listening to an alien vorsay, pleased

1140
00:56:33,519 --> 00:56:37,079
through broken translation software. The chamber was quieter than Lorrain

1141
00:56:37,119 --> 00:56:40,039
had ever heard. Hartly, it had to be said. It

1142
00:56:40,079 --> 00:56:43,400
was the emperor's absence from this session. Falthano's had been ill,

1143
00:56:43,480 --> 00:56:46,400
nothing serious, according to the official communications, but enough to

1144
00:56:46,440 --> 00:56:49,199
keep him confined to the inner Palace. His influence was

1145
00:56:49,239 --> 00:56:51,280
so present in the room, aunt in the senators who

1146
00:56:51,320 --> 00:56:52,960
aligned with him, and in the general weight of his

1147
00:56:53,000 --> 00:56:56,280
decades long dominance over the political structure, but he was

1148
00:56:56,280 --> 00:56:58,719
not there to apply direct pressure, and in his absence

1149
00:56:58,880 --> 00:57:02,079
the room breed to little Differently, Lauren took the floor last.

1150
00:57:02,760 --> 00:57:05,440
She didn't make a long speech. She didn't try to

1151
00:57:05,440 --> 00:57:08,400
be dramatic. She was sixty three years old and had

1152
00:57:08,440 --> 00:57:10,480
been a senator for thirty one years, and she had

1153
00:57:10,519 --> 00:57:12,159
learned that the most effective thing. You could you in

1154
00:57:12,199 --> 00:57:14,639
a roomful of frightened a powerful people, wast be calm

1155
00:57:14,639 --> 00:57:17,519
and clear and refuse to waste words. We have a choice,

1156
00:57:17,519 --> 00:57:20,639
she said. We can destroy this vessel. We can do

1157
00:57:20,719 --> 00:57:23,320
her to day, Draff. His fleet is in position, and

1158
00:57:23,360 --> 00:57:25,199
if we relieve him and send a commander who will

1159
00:57:25,239 --> 00:57:28,119
follow orders without thinking, it will be done before nightfall.

1160
00:57:28,719 --> 00:57:31,639
The ship will be gone. Two hundred sixty three people

1161
00:57:31,639 --> 00:57:34,239
who want to go home will be dead. And somewhere

1162
00:57:34,280 --> 00:57:36,719
in a galaxy we cannot reach, there are people who

1163
00:57:36,719 --> 00:57:39,480
built their ship and send it out, and eventually they

1164
00:57:39,480 --> 00:57:41,960
will notice it hasn't come back. And eventually they will

1165
00:57:41,960 --> 00:57:45,400
come looking, she paused, We will have told them by

1166
00:57:45,400 --> 00:57:47,199
what we do to day what kind of people we are.

1167
00:57:47,800 --> 00:57:50,480
She looked round the chamber. Or we can do something

1168
00:57:50,519 --> 00:57:53,159
we have never done in six thousand years of Dominion history.

1169
00:57:53,679 --> 00:57:55,800
We can let a vessel leave our territory in peace.

1170
00:57:56,480 --> 00:57:58,599
We can give them the navigational data that might help

1171
00:57:58,599 --> 00:58:01,000
them find their way home. One we can tell the

1172
00:58:01,000 --> 00:58:03,119
rest of the galaxy and whoever is waiting in the

1173
00:58:03,159 --> 00:58:05,880
other galaxy, that when the Dominion encountered something powerful and

1174
00:58:05,920 --> 00:58:08,239
unknown and the loane, we chose to ask questions first.

1175
00:58:08,880 --> 00:58:12,679
Another pause longer. That is not weakness. I want to

1176
00:58:12,719 --> 00:58:16,119
be very clear about that. It is not weakness. It

1177
00:58:16,199 --> 00:58:17,880
is a kind of strength that is worth having, the

1178
00:58:17,960 --> 00:58:20,800
kind that doesn't cost you everything. Eventually, the vote was

1179
00:58:20,840 --> 00:58:24,000
forty four to thirty nine, with five O persentions. It

1180
00:58:24,079 --> 00:58:27,320
was enough. The official word reached Draffa six hours later,

1181
00:58:27,920 --> 00:58:31,639
the destruction order was suspended. He was authorized cautiously, with

1182
00:58:31,679 --> 00:58:33,679
more conditions than he had ever seen attached to a

1183
00:58:33,679 --> 00:58:37,039
single military authorization, to continue communications and to work toward

1184
00:58:37,079 --> 00:58:40,519
a provisional agreement. He informed Captain Foss immediately. There was

1185
00:58:40,559 --> 00:58:43,280
a pause after his transmission, longer than the signal delay

1186
00:58:43,320 --> 00:58:46,719
would explain. When her voice came back, it was still professional,

1187
00:58:46,800 --> 00:58:49,679
still composed, but Draffa had been listening to it for

1188
00:58:49,760 --> 00:58:52,079
days by now, and he heard the breath underneath the words,

1189
00:58:52,119 --> 00:58:54,000
the kind of breath Yoletta. After holding it for a

1190
00:58:54,079 --> 00:58:58,079
very long time, Thank you, Admiral, she said, tell me

1191
00:58:58,119 --> 00:59:01,280
what you need from us. Then. Agociations took three days.

1192
00:59:01,960 --> 00:59:04,800
They were conducted between Voss and Draffed directly, with Loreen's

1193
00:59:04,800 --> 00:59:06,920
office participating through relay and or by serving as the

1194
00:59:06,960 --> 00:59:10,800
results primary translator and technical liaison. Where they were not simple,

1195
00:59:10,800 --> 00:59:13,280
they were deepen certainties on both sides, and more than

1196
00:59:13,320 --> 00:59:15,480
once the discussion stalled on points were the cultural gap

1197
00:59:15,519 --> 00:59:18,199
between Humanity the Dominion was simply too wide to bridge quickly.

1198
00:59:18,719 --> 00:59:22,280
But they kept talking. That was the essential thing. They

1199
00:59:22,360 --> 00:59:24,480
kept talking, and they kept working, and every time a

1200
00:59:24,519 --> 00:59:26,639
wall appeared, they went round it rather than through it.

1201
00:59:27,280 --> 00:59:30,159
What they agreed to, finally, was modest by the standards

1202
00:59:30,159 --> 00:59:32,159
of what either side had hoped for, ungenerous by the

1203
00:59:32,199 --> 00:59:35,519
standards of what either side had expected. The Dominion would

1204
00:59:35,519 --> 00:59:38,480
provide the Adamantine Resolve with navigational charts of this galaxy

1205
00:59:38,519 --> 00:59:41,840
stellar geography, information that would take Obay's calculations and give

1206
00:59:41,880 --> 00:59:43,880
them the contexts they had been missing for two years.

1207
00:59:44,519 --> 00:59:47,079
They would also provide an analysis of known spatial anomalies

1208
00:59:47,119 --> 00:59:49,079
in the outer regions, at which joe By thought gave

1209
00:59:49,159 --> 00:59:50,920
him a minimum strong lead on were to look for

1210
00:59:50,920 --> 00:59:54,559
a slip space for turn point in exchange. Humanity's first

1211
00:59:54,559 --> 00:59:57,320
contact with the Dominion would be recorded as peaceful, something

1212
00:59:57,360 --> 00:59:59,599
Laurene had insisted on because she understood the long term

1213
00:59:59,599 --> 01:00:02,280
important of how the story would be told. There were

1214
01:00:02,320 --> 01:00:05,000
things that couldn't be agreed on in three days. There

1215
01:00:05,000 --> 01:00:06,599
were things that would need to be returned to by

1216
01:00:06,639 --> 01:00:09,440
other people, even in other conversations, that neither Voss nor

1217
01:00:09,480 --> 01:00:12,280
Draffa would necessarily be part of the shape of what

1218
01:00:12,400 --> 01:00:15,079
humanity and the dominion might eventually be to each other. Allies,

1219
01:00:15,159 --> 01:00:17,559
trading partners, an easy neighbor, something that didn't have a

1220
01:00:17,639 --> 01:00:19,679
name yet, was not something that could be decided by

1221
01:00:19,679 --> 01:00:22,760
one battleship captain and one fleet conducting negotiations and imperfect

1222
01:00:22,800 --> 01:00:26,880
translation software. But they had started it. That was what mattered.

1223
01:00:27,440 --> 01:00:29,519
On the day before the Resolve was scheduled to depart,

1224
01:00:29,639 --> 01:00:32,400
it thus made an unusual request. She asked if it

1225
01:00:32,440 --> 01:00:35,119
was possible to speak directly visually, face to face over

1226
01:00:35,159 --> 01:00:37,079
the channel with Draffa and any of his staff who

1227
01:00:37,119 --> 01:00:41,480
were willing. It was unusual, Everything about this situation was unusual.

1228
01:00:42,000 --> 01:00:46,199
Draffa agreed. He gathered his bridge crew around the communication screen.

1229
01:00:46,800 --> 01:00:49,519
Most of them had never seen a human face, and

1230
01:00:49,599 --> 01:00:51,440
this stood in a half circle, and they looked at

1231
01:00:51,480 --> 01:00:53,639
the screen and tried to maintain the professional composure of

1232
01:00:53,679 --> 01:00:56,760
do many A naval officers, while their expression said clearly

1233
01:00:56,880 --> 01:00:59,000
enough for anyone to read that this was the strangest

1234
01:00:59,000 --> 01:01:02,400
and most remarkable thing they had ever experienced on the screen.

1235
01:01:02,480 --> 01:01:04,840
Voss looked back at them. She was sitting at what

1236
01:01:04,880 --> 01:01:06,960
appeared to be the command station of her bridge, and

1237
01:01:07,039 --> 01:01:09,280
her crew was array behind her in a similar arrangement.

1238
01:01:09,920 --> 01:01:12,239
Two hundred sixty three people when it felt like all

1239
01:01:12,239 --> 01:01:14,000
crowded in to see, though of course it was only

1240
01:01:14,079 --> 01:01:16,440
a fraction of that, as many as the camera could capture.

1241
01:01:17,039 --> 01:01:18,679
They were all different from each other in ways that

1242
01:01:18,760 --> 01:01:23,360
Draffare found fascinating. Different heights, different skin colors, different ages,

1243
01:01:23,480 --> 01:01:26,719
in different states of tidiness and uniform regulation compliants. They

1244
01:01:26,719 --> 01:01:28,360
looked like a crew that had been through a very

1245
01:01:28,400 --> 01:01:30,800
long expedition and had stopped worrying about the small things

1246
01:01:30,800 --> 01:01:34,599
a while ago. They looked happy, he realized, not joyce,

1247
01:01:34,639 --> 01:01:38,079
too tired for that, but genuinely, quietly happy, the particular

1248
01:01:38,119 --> 01:01:40,119
happiness of people who had been afraid for a very

1249
01:01:40,159 --> 01:01:42,679
long time and had just been given a reason to hope.

1250
01:01:43,239 --> 01:01:45,440
Foss's face for the first time in all their hours

1251
01:01:45,480 --> 01:01:49,079
of conversation showed something other than careful professionalism. There was

1252
01:01:49,119 --> 01:01:52,679
a smile on it, not large, but real. I wanted

1253
01:01:52,719 --> 01:01:54,760
to say thank you, she said, with a face attached

1254
01:01:54,760 --> 01:01:57,239
to it. So it means something more than words on

1255
01:01:57,280 --> 01:02:00,960
a channel. She paused, yieher, I know what your is

1256
01:02:01,000 --> 01:02:03,360
to make this happen, Admiral. I know it was a

1257
01:02:03,400 --> 01:02:06,239
simple choice. I know you had orders, and I know

1258
01:02:06,320 --> 01:02:08,760
what following orders and not following orders can cost a

1259
01:02:08,800 --> 01:02:12,119
person in a military structure. She looked directly at the camera.

1260
01:02:12,800 --> 01:02:15,440
He did something brave. I wanted you to know that

1261
01:02:15,480 --> 01:02:18,920
a lot of people understand that. Drafford didn't answer immediately.

1262
01:02:19,559 --> 01:02:22,519
He was not accustomed to being thanked. The Dominion fleet

1263
01:02:22,559 --> 01:02:25,199
was not a place where thanks were common. Express When

1264
01:02:25,199 --> 01:02:27,039
you found that he didn't entirely know what to do

1265
01:02:27,079 --> 01:02:30,320
with it, he settled for honesty. You also did something brave,

1266
01:02:30,480 --> 01:02:33,000
he said, sitting still. Well, three hundred ships surrounded you,

1267
01:02:33,639 --> 01:02:37,559
not fighting, waiting. He paused, that is harder than fighting.

1268
01:02:38,079 --> 01:02:39,920
I think many people in my fleet would not have

1269
01:02:39,960 --> 01:02:42,639
been capable of it. Voss was quite for a moment.

1270
01:02:43,400 --> 01:02:46,400
Then she said, We've had a lot of practice. The

1271
01:02:46,480 --> 01:02:50,440
Adamantine Resolve left the following morning. It departed slowly at first,

1272
01:02:50,480 --> 01:02:52,400
and moving through the outer edge of the fleet formation

1273
01:02:52,480 --> 01:02:55,360
as the Dominion worships cleared a path. The three hundred

1274
01:02:55,400 --> 01:02:57,599
ships held their positions in a vast spread across space.

1275
01:02:58,280 --> 01:03:00,320
The single human vessel moved between them and out the

1276
01:03:00,360 --> 01:03:03,760
other side, and then accelerated away into the dark. Draffa

1277
01:03:03,800 --> 01:03:06,400
watched it go on as main display. He watched it

1278
01:03:06,480 --> 01:03:08,039
until it was too small to see with the naked

1279
01:03:08,079 --> 01:03:10,800
eye and only visible on the census screen. He watched

1280
01:03:10,800 --> 01:03:14,079
it until Oba's calculations, he fared by the dominion navigational data,

1281
01:03:14,119 --> 01:03:16,239
took the Resolve toward the outer regions, where the anomaly

1282
01:03:16,320 --> 01:03:20,159
data suggested a possible return point. Then it jumped, not

1283
01:03:20,239 --> 01:03:23,480
a Dominion style dumb not the clean established fold of

1284
01:03:23,480 --> 01:03:28,400
a properly mapped hyperlane, something faster, stranger, less predictable, a

1285
01:03:28,440 --> 01:03:31,039
bright flash of distorted space that the Resolve punched through

1286
01:03:31,079 --> 01:03:33,960
like a needle through cloth. And then it was gone.

1287
01:03:34,039 --> 01:03:36,719
The censors recorded its dress signature in local space that

1288
01:03:36,760 --> 01:03:41,800
faded within seconds one one two million light years toward home, hopefully,

1289
01:03:41,880 --> 01:03:44,559
or at least towards somewhere that might lead there. Carrying

1290
01:03:44,599 --> 01:03:47,199
Oba's calculations and the navigational shots and the months of

1291
01:03:47,239 --> 01:03:49,360
dato by head built up, all of it, now finally

1292
01:03:49,400 --> 01:03:51,880
given the context it had been missing. The bridge of

1293
01:03:51,880 --> 01:03:56,039
the Valcor's judgment was quiet. Admiral his communications officer said,

1294
01:03:56,079 --> 01:03:58,719
we have a response from Valcarra from the Emperor's office.

1295
01:03:59,320 --> 01:04:04,199
Drafa turned read it. The communications officer read it. It

1296
01:04:04,239 --> 01:04:08,039
was not a pleasant message. It detailed at length Draffa's

1297
01:04:08,119 --> 01:04:11,440
relations of direct orders, his insubordination in coping Senator Lawn's

1298
01:04:11,440 --> 01:04:14,960
office with classified communications, his failure to perform his assigned mission,

1299
01:04:15,000 --> 01:04:17,119
and his general conduct as a fleet officer over the

1300
01:04:17,119 --> 01:04:20,039
preceding days. It informed him that he would face a

1301
01:04:20,079 --> 01:04:23,519
formal review board upon his return to Volcara. He listened

1302
01:04:23,559 --> 01:04:25,320
to it with the same expression he had worn throughout

1303
01:04:25,360 --> 01:04:29,679
everything else, steady, patient, not afraid. Acknowledged receipt, he said.

1304
01:04:30,320 --> 01:04:32,079
He looked at the space where the resolve had been.

1305
01:04:32,599 --> 01:04:34,840
Then he looked at the debris field still visible at

1306
01:04:34,840 --> 01:04:36,719
the age of sence, arranged the remnants of the forty

1307
01:04:36,719 --> 01:04:39,400
ships from the first engagement. Then he looked at his

1308
01:04:39,440 --> 01:04:41,639
bridge crew, the people who had stood beside him through this,

1309
01:04:41,920 --> 01:04:44,159
who had watched him make choices they hadn't been sure about,

1310
01:04:44,199 --> 01:04:47,679
and had stayed with him anyway. His Communication's officerer was

1311
01:04:47,719 --> 01:04:51,519
watching him Admiral, the young officer said carefully, error, should

1312
01:04:51,559 --> 01:04:54,519
we report it as a victory? Straffa thought about Voss's

1313
01:04:54,519 --> 01:04:56,519
face and the screen, the tied smile, the thanks that

1314
01:04:56,559 --> 01:04:58,760
had come of the face attached to it. He thought

1315
01:04:58,800 --> 01:05:01,119
about three hundred ships around Unding one batted vessel and

1316
01:05:01,119 --> 01:05:03,679
that vessels sitting still and waiting and asking a complete

1317
01:05:03,679 --> 01:05:06,440
sincerity to be heard. He thought about what winning and

1318
01:05:06,480 --> 01:05:08,159
losing actually meant when he took them out of the

1319
01:05:08,199 --> 01:05:10,320
context of weapons and body counts and put them into

1320
01:05:10,320 --> 01:05:12,199
the context of what kind of people you chose to

1321
01:05:12,239 --> 01:05:15,519
be reported? As a warning, he said quietly to ourselves

1322
01:05:15,599 --> 01:05:18,400
about what we almost did. Nobody in the bridge bow

1323
01:05:18,440 --> 01:05:21,480
for a moment. Then Korrath, standing to his left, made

1324
01:05:21,480 --> 01:05:23,559
a low sound that might have been agreement, and turned

1325
01:05:23,559 --> 01:05:25,960
back to his station. One by one. The rest of

1326
01:05:25,960 --> 01:05:28,719
the bridge crew did the same, back to their consoles,

1327
01:05:28,880 --> 01:05:31,360
back to their work, back to the ordinary business of

1328
01:05:31,400 --> 01:05:33,480
a fleet that had just been part of something extraordinary

1329
01:05:33,559 --> 01:05:36,159
and was now figuring out what came after. In the

1330
01:05:36,199 --> 01:05:39,280
Senate on Volkara, Senator Lauri natterphiled a formal record of

1331
01:05:39,280 --> 01:05:41,400
the engagement and its resolution, and made sure it was

1332
01:05:41,519 --> 01:05:43,679
entered into the permanent Imperial Archives in the way that

1333
01:05:43,719 --> 01:05:47,039
all official records were sale for a period, then eventually

1334
01:05:47,079 --> 01:05:50,360
public in March. She made sure of the record was complete,

1335
01:05:50,960 --> 01:05:53,679
not just the military parts, all of it. The signal

1336
01:05:53,679 --> 01:05:56,639
before the first battle that nobody had answered the word

1337
01:05:56,679 --> 01:05:58,440
at the end of the message to the escape pod

1338
01:05:59,239 --> 01:06:01,960
four eyeus of conversation between an admiral and a captain

1339
01:06:01,960 --> 01:06:04,800
who were trying very hard to understand each other. She

1340
01:06:04,920 --> 01:06:07,039
wanted it in the record because she understood something that

1341
01:06:07,119 --> 01:06:09,559
Emperor and the military hawks and the frightened senators did

1342
01:06:09,559 --> 01:06:12,800
not yet fully understand. That something had happened here that

1343
01:06:12,880 --> 01:06:15,480
was bigger than a battle or a political decision that

1344
01:06:15,639 --> 01:06:18,360
somewhere out in a galaxy they couldn't reach. There were

1345
01:06:18,360 --> 01:06:20,280
people who had sent a ship so far from home

1346
01:06:20,320 --> 01:06:22,320
that finding the way back had taken years of work,

1347
01:06:22,320 --> 01:06:24,880
can hope and refusal to give up. That when those

1348
01:06:24,920 --> 01:06:27,079
people had been surrounded in a gun and given every

1349
01:06:27,079 --> 01:06:28,960
reason in the world to fight, they had chosen to

1350
01:06:28,960 --> 01:06:31,679
sit still and wait and ask him broken translation software

1351
01:06:31,719 --> 01:06:34,840
for a chance to be heard, and eventually someone had listened.

1352
01:06:35,480 --> 01:06:38,360
She wanted that in the record because she believed she genuinely,

1353
01:06:38,440 --> 01:06:42,000
deeply believed that it was going to matter, not just now, later,

1354
01:06:42,199 --> 01:06:44,880
years from now, decades from now, when other choices had

1355
01:06:44,880 --> 01:06:47,199
to be made and other meetings had to happen. She

1356
01:06:47,280 --> 01:06:49,039
wanted someone in the future to be able to look

1357
01:06:49,079 --> 01:06:50,920
back at this moment and see what had been possible

1358
01:06:50,920 --> 01:06:53,719
and what had been chosen. She filed the record and

1359
01:06:53,760 --> 01:06:55,639
went to the window and looked out of Okara, the

1360
01:06:55,679 --> 01:06:57,719
towers and the lights in the city that never truly

1361
01:06:57,760 --> 01:07:02,360
slept above it. The sky was four stars. Among those stars,

1362
01:07:02,360 --> 01:07:05,320
impossibly far away, two hundred sixty three people were going home.

1363
01:07:05,920 --> 01:07:08,559
She thought that was worth knowing about. She thought that

1364
01:07:08,679 --> 01:07:11,960
was worth remembering. Somewhere in the dark between galaxies, the

1365
01:07:11,960 --> 01:07:15,679
Adamantine Resolve was running hard. Captain Allarov All sat in

1366
01:07:15,679 --> 01:07:17,639
her command chair with a fresh cap of coffee and

1367
01:07:17,719 --> 01:07:20,559
watched the stars move on the main screen. Different stars

1368
01:07:20,559 --> 01:07:23,239
than the ones she had grown up watching, Different stars

1369
01:07:23,239 --> 01:07:25,599
than the one she had navigated by for her entire career,

1370
01:07:26,159 --> 01:07:29,119
but stars none the less. The universe was full of them.

1371
01:07:29,639 --> 01:07:31,639
That had always been for her a source of comfort,

1372
01:07:31,719 --> 01:07:34,800
rather than fear. So much of it out there, so

1373
01:07:34,920 --> 01:07:38,000
much to find. Ob I was at his station. He

1374
01:07:38,039 --> 01:07:40,519
had not slept in thirty two hours. He had the

1375
01:07:40,559 --> 01:07:43,480
Dominion navigational charts spread across three screens, and his own

1376
01:07:43,480 --> 01:07:45,960
calculations on a fourth, and he was working through them

1377
01:07:45,960 --> 01:07:48,039
with the focused, rapid energy of someone who had been

1378
01:07:48,079 --> 01:07:49,960
given a quito luck. They had been staring at for

1379
01:07:50,000 --> 01:07:54,079
almost two years. Captain, he said, without looking up, Oh, by,

1380
01:07:54,239 --> 01:07:56,840
I think I have it. He paused. The bridge went

1381
01:07:56,920 --> 01:08:00,000
very quiet. There's an anomaly signature about four months from

1382
01:08:00,079 --> 01:08:03,039
our current position, consistent with SLIPT space activity in a

1383
01:08:03,079 --> 01:08:06,280
region the Dominion charts described as navigationally unstable, which, based

1384
01:08:06,320 --> 01:08:08,360
on what happened to us two years ago, is probably

1385
01:08:08,400 --> 01:08:10,800
why we ended up here in the first place. He

1386
01:08:10,840 --> 01:08:14,159
looked up from his screens. His eyes were red from tiredness,

1387
01:08:14,159 --> 01:08:16,199
but the expression in them was something she hadn't seen

1388
01:08:16,239 --> 01:08:18,680
in a long time. If I'm reading this right, and

1389
01:08:18,720 --> 01:08:21,319
I'm fairly confident i'm reading this rite, that's a door home.

1390
01:08:21,920 --> 01:08:25,800
Four months after two years four months was almost nothing.

1391
01:08:26,319 --> 01:08:29,039
Foss looked at him navigator for a moment. Then she

1392
01:08:29,079 --> 01:08:30,760
looked round the bridge, at the crew that had been

1393
01:08:30,800 --> 01:08:32,920
through everything with her, that had survived the wrong turn

1394
01:08:33,039 --> 01:08:35,039
and the two years of searching and the fights they

1395
01:08:35,039 --> 01:08:37,680
hadn't wanted, and the diplomacy they hadn't been trained for.

1396
01:08:38,439 --> 01:08:39,960
She looked at all of them and they looked back

1397
01:08:40,000 --> 01:08:42,479
at her, and nobody said anything, because there wasn't anything

1398
01:08:42,520 --> 01:08:45,039
to say that felt equal to the moment. She turned

1399
01:08:45,079 --> 01:08:47,920
back to the front sec horse, she said, and the

1400
01:08:47,920 --> 01:08:52,119
Adamantine Resolve ran on through the dark toward home. And

1401
01:08:52,199 --> 01:08:54,640
that is the end. Thank you for listening, and I

1402
01:08:54,640 --> 01:09:03,760
will see you in the next one. An