<Eridani Landing: 8 years 2 month 15 days>
<Wandering Time: [283 Years]>
Ranlin glanced over at the Captain. “We have permission from the Council yet?”
Maunt would have been annoyed with any of his other subordinates demanding the same thing from him every day, but he was as anxious as she was about this, so he let the repetitive question slide. Visiting the human home world and initiating contact with them could potentially save their race.
“Not yet, and its looks like we’ll only be getting enough support to take the Valiant through the Beacons to the system, not half of the fleet like my initial request.”
“Well you were planning on being negotiated down, weren’t you?” asked Ranlin.
“I had hoped to take the Courage and the Selfless as well.”
“I don’t get it, if the Humans have kept up with their pace of advancement, they could be our biggest allies! Why doesn’t the Council see that?”
“They do. But they could also represent a new threat. We’re teetering on the edge of extinction as is; no point in taking risks.”
The analyst rolled her eyes. “We’ve been on the edge of extinction for nearly 300 years! If we don’t take risks that won’t change anytime soon!”
Maunt sighed. “That’s the balancing act the Council has to deal with on a daily basis, though. One wrong action, one wrong decision and we run into an Imperial patrol while our engines are still spooling – and then we’re dead. Can you blame them for being cautious?”
“It’s still annoying,” grumbled Ranlin.
Maunt smiled. “It’s the annoying procedure that has kept us alive.”
Ranlin grumbled several other things under her breath, but Maunt ignored her. He leaned over the desk she was working at to pick up one of the odd trinkets that had been in the shuttle, a small device that was composed of a small metallic disk and two straps of material, with a simple clasp on the ends.
“What’s this?” asked Maunt looking at it.
“A wristwatch, to keep time on the planet. It’s a strictly mechanical device; the humans divided their day up into twenty four hours, hence the number of markings. From what I understand it’s a holdover from older technologies. The Human on the shuttle had it out of preference.”
Ranlin took the device and demonstrated laying it over her forearm.
Maunt looked at it for a moment. “Interesting. What about the rest of this stuff?”
Ranlin pointed at the large pile of supplies that was sitting in a sealed container in a corner of the room, “That’s all food. From what I can tell very little of it was fresh when they left Earth, dried meats and the like were the majority of the supplies. Technically most of it is still edible given that it was preserved in space as well, but I’m not really that keen to try any of it.”
Maunt shook his head, “No, but it is still something to analyze in the lab along with the other genetic samples.”
“I’m still sorting through the data on the data storage devices and figuring out the encoding for a lot of it. The computers were able to sort our most of it but it’s still slow going. It looks like media files take up the majority of the space,” said Ranlin.
“Keep working on it. If you’re able to dig up anything that is more than just a curiosity, we might be able to convince the Council to make contact with Earth.”
“Like?” asked Ranlin.
“You said that there was a massive collection of scientific data and analysis. See if you can get anything useful out of it.”
“The Humans were far behind Empire technology three hundred years ago. At the rate they were progressing they might be equal now. What use is 300 year old research?”
Maunt smiled. “The Empire doesn’t think of everything. They don’t have anything like our handheld weapons, do they? That technology is based on research we did before the Evacuation. The Humans might have a similar advantage. A theoretical breakthrough that they couldn’t implement with the technology of their time, but which we could easily utilize.”
“That might be possible. From what I’ve pieced together the Human’s method of problem solving seemed to just be brute force – try as many things as possible and see what works.”
Maunt laughed. “Sound interesting. See what you can find, I’m cutting your bridge shifts down to auxiliary. I need you working on this.”
“Can I bring more staff in to help?” asked Ranlin.
“If they want to help. I can’t officially assign anyone else to the analysis of a wreckage indefinitely. Please make sure they have security clearance of level three or higher though. We don’t know what could be in the files.”
“I don’t even have level three!” complained Ranlin.
“You’ve had it for a week now, did you not check your messages?”
Ranlin looked down at her wrist-com and scrolled back through the logs.
“Oh,”
“Oh? You get promoted and that’s your response?”
“I’m not crazy about more paperwork.”
Maunt put his hands up in the air, exclaiming “Kids!”
Ranlin sniggered, “You’ve been a Captain for how long sir?”
“Too long, and I hate the paperwork too but I need someone else to share my misery with – so suck it up and say thank you.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Ranlin smiling at the man.
Maunt grunted and turning left the analyst to her work.
<Eridani Landing: 8 years 2 month 20 days>
Humans were a fascinating race. Ranlin was going through the data files that had been on the shuttle as quickly as she could, but the sheer amount of it was large enough that she could spend the rest of her life digging through it and hardly scratch the surface.
Books, scientific journals, videos, analysis, jokes, references, music, games, and a thousand other things were inside the primitive data storage devices.
Humanity was more violent than the Vakurians had ever been; more violent than any class C species on record, in fact. They had never had any lasting peace, their entire history was one of blood and strife. Ranlin had no doubts that the trend had continued in the three hundred years the Lovers had been adrift.
Any rational species would turn tail and run as quickly as their FTL drives would carry them away from Earth. Still Ranlin could see why Rogue had fallen in love with one, there was an intangible spirit behind everything Humanity did. They saw their faults, even those they had repeated over and over again through their history. They didn’t accept them, and they didn’t care that the last thousand attempts to form peace had been unsuccessful.
Humans were aware of what they were, and yet strived to be better. They were not content with the now, but they accepted it. They learned from the past and tried to make a better future even if every attempt so far had been fruitless.
They had invented the atomic bomb, and used it only twice in war.
Her own people had been so hell bent on destruction that they had doomed themselves. The war that had destroyed her world had been brief and devastating. They had not understood war like Humanity had, didn’t know what their weapons would do. All they had known was that they would destroy their enemies and that was all they had cared about.
Humanity had seen the destruction held in the atomic, and recoiled from it.
Humanity had gone to the brink of self-destruction so many times, yet unlike every other class C species they had managed to pull themselves away from the abyss of annihilation. Maybe it was luck, or maybe it was something more inherent to the species. Some little part inside of them that would reign their destruction in at the last moments.
Humanity also seemed to be better off for it. With constant war and strife, their technological progression was unlike anything else on record. Their art and literature more varied then that of nearly any culture in the Empire. Everything they did they took to the extreme; they pushed at the boundaries of science, society, knowledge breaking down everything in front of them through sheer force of will.
“Ranlin!”
Startled, the analyst looked up from the page she was reading and the pad of notes she was taking, quickly she shut off the human music that had been playing in the room.
“What the hell was that?” asked Maunt as he scratched at his ears, which were pressed against his skull trying to block out the noise.
“Rock and Roll, a form of music that was becoming popular again when the Lovers left Earth.”
Maunt shook his head. “Sounded like absolute gibberish to me.”
Ranlin nodded. “It’s different.”
Maunt slowly raised his ears. “We’ve got authorization, and we’ve been in transit for the past three hours. Have you checked your messages?”
Ranlin blinked. “What? We’re going to Earth!?”
Maunt nodded. “We are, something you would know if you checked your messages. I figured you would want to be on the bridge.”
Ranlin threw down the tablet and stood. “Yes sir!”
Maunt muttered something under his breath and stomped out of the briefing room, Ranlin eagerly on his tail, her ears pointed straight up, and excited to the point where patches of her skin were randomly camouflaging in and out of visibility.
Stepping back onto the bridge, Ranlin quickly sat down at the auxiliary sensor station.
“Five minutes until we drop out!?” she said, her voice going up an octave and her ears going flat.
“I sent you messages. Read them next time,” growled Maunt.
Ranlin quickly brought up the data she had entered into the computer and tried to sort through what she might send to humans to convey peaceful intent. All too quickly she felt the jolt as the ship shifted out of tachyon FTL.
“Report,” said Maunt.
“No contacts!” said tactical.
“No communication signals!” said the man at the main sensor hub.
Ranlin felt her stomach drop. No signals?
“Nothing?” asked Maunt.
“Nothing that I can detect from here, no,” said the analyst.
Maunt slowly nodded. “Ranlin?”
She shook her head. “There should be communications, sir.”
He nodded and sighed. “Can we get the data packets from the beacon?” he asked.
“Yes sir,” said the man at the main sensor console.
The entire bridge was silent for a moment as the man hacked into the beacon and extracted, and then translated, the Empire’s data. Every beacon stored data about the nearest star systems. They had dropped out of FTL at the very edge of the beacon’s range, inside the orbit of the largest gas planet in the Sol system.
“Sir, the entire system had been quarantined by order of the Empire. Any ship found to have entered the system is to be detained for analysis. There is more encrypted military data I can’t get at but the indicators are that the system was purged.”
Ranlin groaned and put her head in her hands. If the Empire had already encountered Humanity, well, Humanity was probably gone and the few artifacts in the conference room would be all that was left of them.
“So there shouldn’t be anyone in the system proper?” asked Maunt.
“No sir.”
He nodded, “Ranlin do you believe a closer look is warranted?”
“Yes!”
“I want all stations ready, we’ll move in once the FTL drive is spooled up again. We’re not taking any risks to investigate a planet that’s been purged.”
Slowly the Valiant turned and her engines flared, pushing the Vakurian ship towards the planet only one of their kind had ever visited.
Ranlin looked down in horror at the Earth. She had seen pictures of it from orbit in the data cache. The Earth was scarred; even from orbit she could see hundreds of small impact craters, and many larger ones from what could only be concentrated nuclear blasts. The only light on the planet was that from the star; no artificial lights of any kind illuminated the surface of the world.
Humanity, like so many other class C species before it, was gone.
“What the hell happened here?” asked Maunt. Everyone on the bridge was staring at the planet.
Aimlessly, Ranlin searched for anything she could connect to. She found a weak signal emanating from a satellite in orbit. The translation software marked it as something called a black box recording.
“I found something sir, a satellite has some sort of backup record queued for transmission. A final battle log it think.”
“Play it.”
Ranlin nodded and brought the message up, filtering it through the algorithms she had created to handle human media files. This data was more complex then what had been on the shuttle, but it followed the same principals.
“All stations, open fire!”
None of the Vakurians on the bridge could understand what had been said, but the tone of the voice made its intent plain enough.
The command rang out through the video, and Ranlin along with the rest of the bridge crew watched in horrified amazement as the message continued. It was a battle recording, the last one in the satellite’s memory.
The battleground was not above the planet they were in orbit of, but rather the next planet over, the red one that Ranlin knew humanity had been in the process of colonizing when the Lovers left Earth.
The crew of the Valiant watched in horrified fascination as the battle played out. Dozens of primitive looking ships were going up against the old Imperial cruiser, a battle that was plainly being lost by the Humans.
Ship after ship, wave after wave unflinchingly plunged towards the Empire vessel, their weapons continuing to fire vainly into the shields of the massive vessel even when the ships were cleanly split in two by the Imperial ship.
Ranlin watched and a shiver went down her spine. Humanity knew they were once again at the precipice, but for the first time they had not been the ones to place themselves near the edge. So with a vigor unlike anything else in their history, they were fighting as if to say the only ones who could say they were going to die were the members of their own species.
Humanity would accept no fate but the one they chose for themselves.
The camera feed changed views several dozen times, switching from ship to ship, capturing the point of view from each as they sent out their final transmissions.
Ranlin gasped as the lump of metal that had been in the background of most of the video feeds suddenly grew larger. It was a massive space station! The thing moved quickly into the forefront of the battlefield.
Smaller ships quickly darted behind the structure even as handheld weapons fire began to pour from the station. How the Humans had managed to maneuver an entire space station – larger than anything she had ever seen – into the battlefield, Ranlin had no idea.
The Imperial ship seemed to pause, its shields were absorbing all weapons fire but the amount of energy raining down on the shields had not lessened despite the number of ships it had destroyed, instead it only grew more intense.
“You didn’t say the Humans were insane,” breathed Maunt, not taking his eyes from the display.
Ranlin didn’t know what to say. The battle continued, and as she watched with horror, the camera view began to slow in its switching as the ships sending out their last transmissions were being destroyed.
The giant station was now in pieces and the camera was now from the view of one of the last vessels still operating.
Ranlin glanced up at the corner of the screen where the name of the ship was burned into the video.
The Yamato.
The ship had been following the mass of what were unmistakably civilian ships as they tried to run away from the battle into deep space. Turning the Yamato began to accelerate towards the imperial ship. A pure suicide run, and the crew of the ship had to know it.
The Imperial vessel was floating amongst the ruins of a hundred other Human vessels, like a predator gorging and reveling in it victory. Still the Human vessel Yamato dove towards the threat.
Frantic communications were included with the last images, but Ranlin couldn’t translate them quickly enough so she simply watched along with the rest of the crew.
The Yamato’s video feed cut out for a moment, and the ship was suddenly on the other side of the Imperial vessel.
“What the?” breathed Maunt.
The Yamato fired off missile after missile, shot after shot into the Imperial vessel, sinking them into the weakening section of the shields to no avail.
The Imperial ship turned to bring its main guns to bear on the Yamato, and once again the video feed cut and the Yamato was suddenly on the other side of the ship again directly in line with the damaged portion.
The crew of the Valiant watched as the primitive Human ship repeated the trick several more times until in a burst of static the video cut out and was replaced by a view from what had to be the satellite itself, zoomed into the site of the battle a planet away, catching the large explosion on the surface of the Imperial vessel, which was accompanied by a loss of main power on the ship.
The satellite turned to look at the escaping Human ships, and Ranlin blanched as the tear in space flashed open in front of the small fleet. As fearless as when they had faced the enemy, the Human ships dove into the rending of reality and disappeared.
Slowly the view tracked back to the Imperial ship, the red planet framed behind it.
The video ended.
The entire bridge crew of the Valiant was silent, until finally the weapons officer spoke.
“That makes our hijacking of a few Imperial ships looked pitiful. They threw an entire fucking space station at the Empire!”
Maunt leaned back in his seat. “And they have some new form of FTL.”
Ranlin was the most excited. “They’re still alive!”
Maunt nodded, and stood up.
“The council needs to hear about this. Ranlin, you have full access to all ship resources. Start pulling as much data as you can from what’s left operating. I want a full tactical unit ready in an hour. Pick us a target where it would be best to land and collect data.”
“Yes sir!”
The bridge of the Valiant exploded into a flurry of activity as the entire crew was infected with the same feeling of burning curiosity and hope that had been coursing through Ranlin since the discovery of the Lovers’ shuttle.
Another class C Species had fought the Empire. They hadn’t won, but like them they had survived.
The Vakurian race wasn’t alone. Somewhere in the depths of space they had an ally.
Ranlin stooped down and picked up the small piece of technology from the ground. Like everything else around her, it was covered in dust and decay.
She had picked one of the larger cities – or what was left of it – on the same continent where the Lovers had been. It was on the opposite coast of a city the old map data had identified as San Francisco, not that she had any idea how to say the last part of the name. For the moment she was calling is San.
The Valiant had a fleet of four shuttles in total, and three of them had landed inside the middle of the alien city, finding streets and patches of smooth ground large enough for them to land. Although the tactical units had stormed out of the ship first, it quickly became apparent that there was nothing alive to threaten the Vakurian explorers.
From orbit the city looked like it had suffered the least damage but still it was a mess.
There were no bodies, but in corners and inside the buildings were piles of clothing and more of the small electronic devices.
“What the hell did the Empire hit them with?” asked Ranlin looking around.
“Something from Hygonix I would bet,” said Marcus as he stepped out of the shuttle.
“What did the Council say?”
The Captain groaned. “Investigate. Don’t take risks.”
“So nothing helpful like additional ships?”
Maunt didn’t say anything and instead turned around to talk with the ground team leader.
Looking around her Ranlin carefully moved a pile of the alien clothing around ignoring the smell from the rotting material and collected the small personal data device adding it to the growing collection. She felt bad taking them, but they needed data.
“It’s strange that the Empire hasn’t established a colony,” said Maunt as he turned back around to face Ranlin as she walked down the streets looking at everything.
“Have you looked at the radiation signature sir? Someone detonated nukes everywhere about a decade ago.”
“The Empire hasn’t used nukes in nearly a thousand years! They like the garden worlds they take to be radiation free.” said Maunt.
“The Humans did it.”
Maunt was silent for a moment, “You think the humans nuked their own world?”
Ranlin shrugged, “There are no bodies, and all the scans say the nuclear weapons all detonated within moments of each other. The lack of bodies is the Empire’s work, some new weapon they’ve developed that targets the class C. It’s a perfect weapon from their point of view, eliminate the virus and leave infrastructure intact, even if it is primitive it’s better than starting from scratch.”
“So that leads you to believe the Humans nuked their own planet, because?”
“It was how they did war, no matter how valuable an asset if the enemy was going to take it they would rather have it destroyed. They would rather the world belong to no one then let the Empire take it.”
“That’s insane.”
Ranlin shrugged. “It’s Human. Still, nuclear weapons are nothing compared to what had to have been a biological weapon.”
Maunt nodded in agreement. “We need to find evidence for it. If the Empire does have some sort of biological weapon, that would warrant the Council sending a larger investigative force. Combined with the FTL tech that the Humans used it might be reason enough for the fleet to actively start looking for them.”
Ranlin nodded and dusted off her knees. Slipping another data device into her bag, she stood. “Alright. Could I have a shuttle?”
Maunt glanced over at his subordinate. “Why?”
“I need to run scans from the air,”
“You can run those as we leave, why do you want a shuttle now?”
Ranlin sighed and reached into a pocket to extract the Human time keeping device. “I want to return this to its proper place. We owe them that much.”
Maunt looked at her silently for a moment, impassive. “You’re getting a little to sentimental don’t you think? You didn’t know them, no matter how many of those files you dig through.”
Ranlin wasn’t sure what else to say. It was true, she had no real reason to go to the location of the home that the two had inhabited. It had been two hundred years almost, the likelihood that it was still standing was small.
“Go, make sure you get thorough scans. Scan for life forms. The bio weapon seems to have left animals in place, and creatures that survive that and a nuclear attack, self-inflicted or not, are going to be rather nasty.”
“I’ll keep my gun,” said Ranlin tapping her sidearm.
Maunt nodded and turned back to the other mass of analysts working around the street.
“Take Klyn with you.”
Ranlin felt her ears droop at that but didn’t say anything else. Klyn was going to be a pain, but arguing with Maunt when his mind was made up would be futile.
“Alright. Thanks.”
“So where are we going?” asked Klyn from co-pilot seat.
“We need samples from another part of the planet’s surface.”
“So we have to go all the way across the continent?” asked Klyn.
Ranlin didn’t bother responding. The shuttle was just starting to fall back into the atmosphere of the planet after the suborbital hop she had performed; it was quicker than flying through the atmosphere.
“We need different samples,” repeated Ranlin.
Klyn huffed and his camouflage rippled in annoyance. That, or he was showing off. Klyn was more naturally inclined to it than most, he hardly had to concentrate to mask his form, even though his clothes remained visible.
It was a trait most women on the ship found attractive, and one that Ranlin had found attractive in the past. Now it was just annoying.
“Fine don’t tell me, are we going to get to shoot anything?”
“Hopefully not, the life on this planet has gone through enough. The records from the Lovers’ shuttle shows that the Humans were on the verge of ecological collapse when they left almost 300 years ago, the destruction of Humanity and the nuclear attacks either undid any recovery efforts or exacerbated the issue if the Humans hadn’t fixed it.”
Klyn yawned, his ears going back in irritation. “Fine, I won’t shoot anything.” He frowned. “Wait, how do you know that?”
“I’m the one sorting through the data on the Lovers’ shuttle!”
Klyn blinked. “Really?”
Ranlin kept the growl in her throat from leaping out. “Yes, really!” she said punctuating her statement by hitting the console in front of her as the ship jolted, diving deeper into the atmosphere.
“Find any weapons?” asked Klyn.
“I’ve been looking through the social and cultural data. Weapons are fairly universal, you either make something go fast or blow up, there’s not much originality to it.”
Klyn was silent for a moment. “So, no?”
“They had enhanced nukes that were utilizing small amounts of antimatter when the Lovers left Earth. If they followed the same technological progression as everyone else, that would mean they had fully fledged antimatter weapons by the time the Empire showed up.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of guns, something a grunt can use.”
“It’s in there but I’m still going through the data.”
“Alright.”
An awkward silence filled the shuttle even as it began to shake slightly as they dove through the atmosphere, plasma fire licking at the hull.
The coordinates were clouded over, but the Human navigational satellites were still working and she had built programs to take advantage of it already. There was no need to even convert the coordinates she had on the Lovers home, assuming the Humans hadn’t changed how their coordinate system worked in the past 200 years.
“Woah!” said Klyn as they broke through the cloud cover.
Beneath the clouds was a military base that had to cover at least three square kilometers. It was obvious even to the aliens what its purpose was. Small, stout buildings, multiple layers of defense and fences to stop anyone on the ground, barely any vegetation and large runways for ships and atmospheric craft.
In the center of one of the runways was what had to be a Human space ship, it had a large score in its armor almost as if something had punched cleanly through it and continued going. The fact that the ship was parked in the perfect center of the runway showed that even with that amount of damage it had managed to land in a controlled manner.
Looking around Ranlin spotted several other craft in varying states of repair. Why the vessels hadn’t been repaired in space Ranlin had no idea, perhaps they hadn’t been able to maintain orbit?
From what she knew, nothing but the smaller Imperial shuttles were designed to go in and out of an atmosphere, but the human battleships – as primitive as they were – seemed to be able to do so.
Glancing down at the coordinates, Ranlin looked out of the view screen and the readout several more times and sighed.
The home of the Lovers was gone, and the human vessel seemed to be parked exactly on the coordinates where the structure had been.
“Humans were serious about their kinetics!” said Klyn.
“What?” asked Ranlin glancing over at the man who was studying the ship as well, with perhaps a more critical eye then she would have initially given him credit for.
“Look at the muzzle of that gun,” Klyn pointed at the main gun of the ship as Ranlin slowly brought the Shuttle in to hover in front of the thing.
“Kinetic weapons are banned in the Empire, the amount of damage a stray slug can do is enormous. That must be what damaged the ship! A kinetic round is almost impossible to stop, without energy shields at least.”
“The Human handguns were chemical based, and something they still used when the Lovers left the planet,” said Ranlin as she slowly brought the ship down on the tarmac in front of the large battle worn human craft.
It was curious, the damage to her hull seemed to be the only marring on the threatening ship. She was not crumbling like the buildings around her. Ranlin shivered and felt herself instinctually camouflage. The aura the ship was giving off was that of a wounded predator, damaged but still very much a threat.
Klyn got up from the co-pilot chair, grabbed his gun, punched the release on the shuttle’s door, and stepped out. Ranlin grabbed her scanning equipment and followed after the man.
The air was colder then what is had been on the opposite side of the continent, but still tolerable. Turning up the heat in their surface suits, Ranlin and Klyn slowly began to walk the length of the Human vessel. Looking up at the side, Ranlin spotted the name along the side it.
“What’s that say?” asked Klyn looking up at the writing as well.
Ranlin glanced down at her computer and frowned after checking her translation. “The California.”
“What’s California?”
Ranlin was looking at her tablet searching through all of the data. “It was the name of a ship that fought in a war between the Humans almost three hundred years ago. I guess they liked the name and used it again?”
Klyn shrugged. “What does it mean though? Warrior or something?”
Ranlin shook her head. “It’s the name of a place where we first landed.”
“I thought that was San Frico.”
“San Friscone, and that was the name of the city not the actual place.”
Klyn turned around to look at her. “They named ships after places? That’s stupid.”
Ranlin didn’t want to admit that she agreed with him. Every Vakurian ship was named after an emotion or feeling, something that embodied the spirit of the ship or her mission. Then again, the Vakurians who had evacuated from the home world on stolen Imperial ships had all grown up on the run, a nuclear husk all that was left of their world with nothing living on it but what the Empire deemed correct. They didn’t have any places they wanted to go back to.
“I think it was to remind them of home even as they were fighting.”
“Still weird.”
Now at the aft of the ship, Ranlin looked up at the engines. They were bells of metal, several dozen of them in varying sizes. Fixed ones were interspaced along the hull in different places as well. The craft would have been far more maneuverable then anything the Empire had in combat. Then again, it was a battleship the size of most Imperial public transport vessels.
A small ramp was coming down from the port side of the ship, opposite the side they had been walking down. Next to it were two small ground transport vehicles. Ranlin had seen dozens of them in varying states of degradation back in the city, but the ones by the ramp were in better condition, looking as if they were still operational.
Her ears drooping, Ranlin glanced back down at her computer. They were at the right spot.
Reaching into her pocket, Ranlin slowly extracted the time keeping device. The thing was broken; the vacuum and drifting in space had seen to that. Still it was the sentiment behind it.
Finding a small indent in the craft, where some sort of port or cable was designed to lock together, Ranlin placed the small device down and took a step back.
The words seemed to work themselves out of her by themselves. It was a combination of things.
A Human who had died for a Vakurian because he loved her. The fact that they had led them back to Earth, the fact that the entire Human race was still alive, somewhere in space, fighting. They were kindred spirits, not yet an ally but the closest the Vakurians had ever come across.
The Humans were the spark of hope.
Her race had been drifting in between the stars for nearly 300 years. Now someone else who had never failed like they had, never destroyed themselves, was amongst those points of lights. They were angry. They had to be, and like every Vakurian they had only a single enemy.
The Empire.
For the first time in her life Ranlin – for the briefest moment – actually considered that they might have a chance to destroy it. Annihilate the heartless and soulless machine that had consumed so many worlds.
“Thank you.”