From the wreckage of the Guardian, we find enough surviving pieces to swiftly reverse-engineer its Death Ray and powerful Ion Drives!
Sadly, the rest of its systems have been vaporized beyond hope of recovery, but exploration of the planet's surface reveals still more: Most of the cities here are in still worse shape than those on Artemis or Rha, with what must once have been grand palaces shattered by weapons comparable to the Guardian's own death ray and plasma torpedoes. Here was no slow, agonizing death, but the sudden and absolute military destruction of an enemy in war! Defense bases on the surface, broken and buried by orbital fire nonetheless retain valuable data about their missile defenses and anti-fighter satelites; with my neutronium exoskeletons and superior construction know-how, I have no trouble digging down to the ruined bases, and with my advanced computer interfaces, I have no trouble either locating the few intact data storage devices or collecting the data contained within - allowing me to defend my own worlds with Hercular Missiles and arm my fleets with Tachyon Beam cannons. Unfortunately, only the data in hardened military storage media survived; there are indications on the planet's surface that it once held biology labs even more heavily protected than the defense infrastructure, but these seem to have been priority targets for orbital bombardment, and their storage media was not as durable as the military variety; nothing in these labs survives. Something is still intact in the mountains - something that has nothing to do with biology, and something of such potential value and importance that I'm almost willing to risk exploring it now, unprepared, with only starship pilots untrained in the skills I may need - but of that I shall speak no more until I can begin to unravel its mystery.
Amidst the rubble of the palaces, I find broken sculptures, shattered visages of people long, long gone. The Masters of Orion were not like the people of Artemis; they built monuments everywhere to their own forms. And I recognize those forms, and my exploring pilots stand amazed, even as I share these improbable images with my allies. And the moment that I do so, Zygot sends to me: "Come to Rha. Send an emissary. We must take action now, or all good peoples of the galaxy - even your mighty Klackons - are doomed."
Ancient Klackon Wisdom:2436-49:
With luck and hard work, everything is possible. With work and hard luck ... not really.
I will not interrupt my exploration of Orion, nor will I hesitate in preparing to claim the world as my own, but I am a hive mind, and it is easy for me to agree that my local ambassador at Rha should come share in a critical Psilon discovery. Zygot explains that the Psilons found the ancient message he is about to show me soon after colonizing Rha, but kept it as a guarded secret, never until now knowing its meaning. It is a single transmission, received too late, when the children had been sent away and the last of the grown Rhans had perished, at a secret communications center on Rha itself. It had been sent by a Rhan agent operating at a distant star, and contained detailed proof of the origins of Rha's horrific plague, engineered specifically to destroy the people of that world. "They created it here," the agent says in the ancient transmission, sending deep scans of the lab where the work had been done. "They made it here and sent it, and -" and his head spins, and a burst of energy fire vaporizes his body. Another energy burst, and the transmission comes to an end. Its point of origin is listed only as Orion.
I inspect the transmission record in detail - it has lain unviewed for centuries, stored until modern times, and then viewed repeatedly, never with any tampering - my computer technology exceeds the Psilons' as theirs exceeds a flea's, and I can be absolutely sure of this, and am - and I know that, unlike with some races, the Psilons could be taken at their word. I have seen the sculptures on Orion's surface; I know who ran its labs; and the Psilons know as well, through me. Zygot asks if I will honor our alliance, and I am compelled to agree. I would not blame the descendants of even the worst of criminals if I could help it, but I can not refute the strength of the Psilons' case.
The Humans ruled the galaxy from Orion, and tried to commit genocide upon their very subjects by the most horrible of possible means. The Humans who live in the modern age have proven every bit as untrustworthy as I could imagine such genocidal terrorists could be - and if Zygot is right, they are working even now to develop engineered plagues specific to every other species in the galaxy. I hope they may be brought to heel - indeed, I hope Zygot is wrong - but for now, until reconciliation can be made for the unthinkable horrors of history, and until we can be sure that it shall not be repeated - war with Lasitus is an inevitability.
Besides, if I refused Zygot, Lasitus and his monkeys would probably have broken our NAP again by next year anyway.
OOC Note: Well and good, but with my chances of Uniting the Triad at "Slim and None" already, the recent Silicoid DoW against me, followed by this demand from the Psilons, mean that Slim has packed up his six-guns and retired to the country.I scrap most of the Huntress designs for parts and savings in maintenance; they had one purpose, and fulfilled it beautifully, but with the discovery of Ion Engines, they're now also obsolete. The first new design is of course the Hive 6.0, a warp 6 colony ship, which fits aboard a medium hull easily. In 2437, I learn to terraform the atmosphere of my hostile worlds, and realize that using similar techniques might be possible on all worlds to increase their effective living space, and therefore start work on Improved Terraforming +50.
The following year, my new factory control plans are complete, rendering it possible to build sub-quantum photoreactive circuits, unattainable with any control mechanisms less precise, and therefore to design ECM Jammer Mark IX defenses. I also confirm my theories about the Andrium alloy, which leaves only Improved Industrial Tech 3 among the construction projects I can infer from Artemis or devise on my own. I'll think it through as a final test of my theories in materials physics, and then strike out as best I can into the unknown ... unless there prove to be more hints at still more advanced techniques among the ruins - and the more-than-ruins - of the world that holds my latest colony!
With two million Klackons established and safely dug in on the surface of Orion, I at last feel safe in beginning to explore the one place on the planet's surface which remains completely intact!
High and alone in Orion's loftiest mountain range stands an ancient, pristine city, untouched by war or time. No orbital fire seems to have struck it, and its ancient electrical systems are still in working order after all these centuries. Gigantic planetary sensor suites that beggar even my advanced space scanners turn their unblinking eyes upon the stars, here and from a transmission network that criss-crosses the planet, tucked away in its highest mountains. There are no life signs in the city, but it continues, fully automated like the Guardian, to hum with electronic life. At close range, when the GNN droid reported my discovery of Orion's technology caches, there was no question any longer of its origin: This city - this huge, lost, empty, never-inhabited machine-city of Orion - is the source of the galactic transmissions, the watcher of the galaxy whom I've been seeking for so long. My Klackons enter the city to study its working systems ... and it responds.
"Welcome, Klackon Explorers." The GNN droid looks down upon me from the largest display screen I've ever seen. I could swear the thing is grinning. "Welcome, Klackon Hive Mind. It's been a long time since anyone visited me."
Through my Klackons, I tell it kindly, "You are no more the newsdroid than I am my exploers. Will you show yourself to me?"
It makes a sound like friendly laughter. "No need! For two years, though waiting patiently through your eagerness to see more closely, you've been looking right at me!"
So we meet, and so our talks begin - for GNN is happy and eager to talk to me, a kindred spirit, in love with knowledge of the galaxy. The droid is merely a humanoid image chosen for the comfort of the masters of Orion who most recently reigned. It is nothing but a mouthpiece for the being with whom I speak: This planet's computer network; this machine the size of a gigantic city. It is the most advanced artificial intelligence ever built in the history of the galaxy: The Galactic Neuroelectric Nexus, built upon Orion by the common ancestors of the Klackons and Artemisians - the natives of the world of Maalor, my modern home! This is GNN, first designed and conceived for Maalorite construction by the modern Psilons' ancestors, in the forgotten age when they lived not upon Mentar ... but Cryslon! Amazed, I ask about Rha, about Kholdan and Artemis, everything I can think of - and the Nexus is prepared to answer me. Its knowledge of galactic history is nearly - nearly absolute, and it has the ancient records at its virtual pincer-tips to prove its tales, and reveal their details to me. So I speak, and listen, and learn the tales I long have sought - not all, but almost - of galactic history!
The people of Maalor were known to be the first to cross the stars, long centuries in the past, long before Nexus was made. It was they who built the great cities of Orion, and they who first met the shaggy, twelve-limbed giants of Crius, and taught the secrets of space travel to them, to the humans of Sol, and to the Psilons of beautiful Cryslon. It was the people of Maalor who first gave that Psilon world its name, looking down upon the glorious crystalline cities that dotted its surface, and they who first discovered Ursa, and established it as the galaxy's first planet-wide wildlife preserve, forbidding harm to its living creatures, though it would be many years before the Psilons discovered and shepherded the as-yet primitive sentience of the planet's dominant species. The Maalorites ruled the galaxy simply because their power was manifest; they had developed interstellar travel, they had shared it among all the galaxy's species, and they continued to lead the galaxy in most fields of technology, though the Psilons had more advanced computers, and the Humans would later pursue areas of biology never conceived by any other species. The time of the Maalorites' rule was a golden age of shared knowledge and labor, and the time when Nexus was first conceived and constructed. It ended only with the age of plagues.
The first galactic plague struck Crius, and wiped out the Criusian civilization completely; the Humans were skilled in biology, and the reports from their investigations sounded believable, and it wasn't until much later that anyone discovered the true origins of the disease: Death Spores, the first Human forays into biological warfare. The Humans had capable diplomats, and as they secretly tested new designer plagues on other aliens' colonies, they gained power and respect in the galaxy, by sweeping in with a cure to each, which they claimed to have discovered swiftly by skill and wisdom but in fact had simply devised at the same time that they built the plague itself. By public acclaim, Human leaders were accepted as the rulers of the galaxy, supplanting the existing council with its Maalorite head. The Humans' treachery went so far beyond what any other species had dreamed possible, there was no hint of suspicion in time to prevent the horrors that followed. Even Nexus itself had no inkling until it intercepted a Psilon transmission - the very one I heard at Rha - and didn't know the full history until it ran a full and secret investigation alongside the Artemisians.
By that time, the Silicoids had come to Cryslon - introduced as bio-engineered medical assistants immune to carbon-based diseases, they were in effect actually slow-acting, walking death spores immune to the effects of their own planetary toxins. The Psilon population dwindled, the Silicoids' grew, and at last the Psilons were forced to abandon their homeworld, never realizing that the Silicoids themselves were the cause of the increasingly hostile atmosphere there. They made a new life for themselves at Rha, building crystalline cities approaching the beauty of Cryslon's own ... until the plague struck that finally killed them all - all but the children who escaped to Mentar. The Maalorites suffered terribly as well; one of the diseases the Humans had secretly introduced and publicly cured was a morphogenic plague that proved nonfatal to the hardy Maalorite constitution, but turned its victims into virtual monsters, horrible mutant creatures incapable of survival without life support even when the Humans rushed in with the cure and stopped the disease's spread ... until the Maalorites discovered that remaining perpetually soaked in salt water permitted the deformed victims to survive normally. These made a new home on Artemis, taking advantage of its endless saline seas, living an amphibious life in which they strove to hide their ugliness and fill their lives with such forms of beauty as would not remind them of what they had become and what they had been - and it was these in whom Nexus secretly confided when it heard the Psilon transmission, after the Humans had introduced their last three superplagues.
The plague of Rha was already in effect, but another, more insidious, spread upon Maalor; it sent the hormone levels of the Maalorite body spiraling out of control, to make its victims violent, furious, and mindlessly destructive, in direct opposition to the natural Maalorite state. Maalorite construction was resilient, and those in the throes of the plague had too little self-control to apply their technological knowledge effectively - else they would not have been in its throes! - but in slow stages, the city-world of Maalor, the most heavily developed and industrialized world in the galaxy, which had been importing resources for sixes of sixes of hexades from other stars, long before the development of Orion began, was disassembled and smashed to pieces, its environment collapsing even as its structures were rendered into their componant minerals and scattered over the planet's surface, even as Maalorites killed each other mindlessly. The plague had swept the planet rapidly, before anyone could realize the source of the madness was a communicable disease, and there might have been no survivors except that one particularly close-knit community, in their love for one another and their efforts to resist the mind-altering power of the disease somehow developed a mutual hive mind, above and immune to the hormonal and instinctive urges of each. So the first Klackon hive came into being.
The first Klackon hive-mind was new to existence, and though it shared the knowledge of all the Klackons that composed it, their individual brains were too overwhelmed with disease-induced floods of hormones to be of any use for that purpose. The hive controlled its members, keeping them from acting on their violent, self-destructive impulses, and moving them into hiding from its violent neighbors as well as it could, and it would likely have been destroyed nonetheless had the Artemisians not discovered them. Automated recovery ships were sent to carry the nascent hive away from Maalor, out to the nearest star - thankfully, the garden world of Kholdan was very close - where it managed to survive long enough to somehow find a cure for its disease and begin its true development. Herein lies one of the maddening gaps in GNN's knowledge however: The process of curing the hormonal plague was long and slow, and should have been beyond the new hive's capabilities ... and yet it somehow kept performing the right experiments, and making the right decisions based on the results, over and over, as if slowly but surely guided by a more knowledgable entity. Nexus assumed the hive-mind itself was the "knowledgable guide" but in the course of our discussions, as it becomes clear that I have no memory or even legend of that period - if consciously experienced, it was never passed on through any part of me - Nexus admits that it no longer believes its original theory, and has no notion of what other than extraordinary fortune could have guided me.
Before my ancestors had even started down this seeming-impossible true course, a wasting plague spread across Artemis; a slow, slow, agonizing designer plague, more horrible still than the one at Rha ... and the Artemisians knew through Nexus how it came. The Humans could not conceive of a sentient machine - a computer capable of acting on its own initiative and being horrified by their actions. They did not visit the GNN city, but fed it programs to take advantage of its computing power, ordering it to warn them of any other race that grew too powerful, and to otherwise keep tabs on the rest of the galaxy. It followed their programs just scrupulously enough to keep them deceived, and warned the Artemisians of what the Psilons had learned, and of their own impending doom. The people of Artemis acted swiftly and decisively, constructing the most deadly weapon ever built in the galaxy, giving it a shape in some ways resembling their own terrifying form, the better to intimidate, but also to demonstrate the reason and the source of its target's ruin. They knew the secrets Nexus had kept: The flight of the Psilon children, the salvation of the Klackons, the development of the Bulrathi and even the Silicoids - each of the last long aided by the Psilons, but each continuing independently. To save these remnants of galactic civilization, and these hopes for the future of the galaxy, the Artemisians knew they had no choice but to destroy the bio-terrorists entirely. So the Guardian was built, with such swiftness and skill as only the people of Artemis could command, and so the Guardian struck Orion and blasted the works of the Maalorites' own hands, destroying the instruments of Human power and their secret bioplague infrastructure alike, sparing only Nexus itself. It crossed the entire galaxy, burning Human bases and secret labs and leaving only nondescript craters where they had stood, with no need to be as careful as at Orion, where Nexus lived. The only Humans who survived were the vacationers and support staff at the historical monument world of Sol 3, the Humans' ancient homeworld. With no advanced technological bases and no bioweapons labs there - the Humans would not bring the plagues they were devising, though tailored specifically for alien species, anywhere near to their long-beloved home - and too few engineers to dream of rebuilding a then-modern infrastructure or even long maintain such amenities as they had, the Humans of Sol were forced like the rest of the galaxy to begin again from a pre-industrial state. And lest they should return to the stars more quickly than anticipated and seek the secrets of the one-time throne world of the galaxy, the Guardian returned to Orion, to wait, and to destroy anyone who tried to reach the world, lest they bring harm to Nexus or attempt to restore the biolabs where the galactic plagues were made.
While the Guardian crossed the stars on its automated mission, the Artemisians prepared their world for the day when someone would visit it once more, and with their world ready, before the wasting plague could reach its peak, they gathered in a hidden tomb, sealed it shut from within in a place where coral reefs would grow over the seal, and ceased to be. I mourn for them, for the Klackons' two-fold saviors ... and wonder still why they would have purged the records of our salvation, and of all their final days.
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Next: War and Discovery
