The Secrets' Crusade

A week and more later, it was still difficult to accept it. You'd suspected that the answer to a War Fleet had been within humanity's grasp, they'd known far too much that they shouldn't have about your people to make a declaration like they'd made at the end of their third battle with your people. To demand that you listen, that you explain, and to show no fear was either the act of madness or terrifying knowledge. Having your suspicion of the latter vindicated had been the worst experience in your many centuries of life.

Watching the War Fleet flash back out of jump, significantly reduced and without the Lumen that had been attached to the deployment made it all too real. That the majority continued coreward at max drive was another pronounced sign of things having gone markedly off-plan. Their support wing stayed within the controlled space around the relay for a few hours, refitting the handful of vessels from the deployment that had required drive replacements, then headed swiftly for the nearest fleet staging base. They provided you with details of the battle, duplicates of packets transmitted to Central Command, and what they showed was exactly what you'd feared.

Somehow, humanity had discovered the truth of the War Fleets. How they'd done that was going to haunt Central's analysts, because there was no basis for their acquisition of that knowledge early enough to develop even basic Orrery technology. That they'd clearly gone and done so anyway was frightening, and made you wonder if the recordings of the previous battle hadn't jarred loose some absurd vein of prophecy.

Since then, you and the rest of the station's crew had done your duty. You'd hardened the controlled space around the station, activating ancient protocols from the time of the War of the Sphere to secure the station and protect it from potential subversion. Central Command had been quick to promise reinforcements to supplement your defence fleet, but they'd take months at best to reach you from the nearest muster, and they were hesitant to risk more War Fleet vessels against an opponent that clearly understood their capabilities.

So you were largely left to your work, preparing to execute the least talked about but always present duty of a Relay Officer. Part of the purpose of a relay station was to act as a tripwire against hostile action, with predictable consequences for the tripwire. Their self-defence capability had been upgraded after the War of the Sphere, but everyone knew that those upgrades had been more to protect the Relay long enough for it to purge and self-destruct in the event of another encounter with such a race. Still, it was gratifying to see the drone clouds grow steadily thicker and more lethal as the days passed.

You tried your best not to pay attention to events beyond your own little slice of the world, but it was difficult. The very existence of your post was to transmit messages across the galaxy. Staying out of touch with it was essentially impossible. So you saw the first movements of Central Command, the internal announcements in preparation for the reactivation of a section of the ancient reserve. If humanity could defend itself against War Fleets, it would be only a matter of time before the truth of their actions spread.

So they would have to be defeated, before the other scattered nations of the galaxy could discover that what so many of them looked upon with truly superstitious fear was in fact just another technological marvel.

But should they?

You'd been grappling with that question in your off duty time ever since the precursor announcements to reserve activation had hit the net. You'd never formally joined a Hearthguard, but you'd spent five cycles working across the Five Sorrows as part of your tour as a Systems Specialist, and something about that time had stuck with you. And though you'd never shirk in your duties, it did make you wonder.

Humanity hadn't breached any of the Directives as far as any of you could see, or at least no Directive that had ever been made public. Just like the Fifth Sorrow, but the Hearthguard had lost much of their sway within the Authority since then. And there were still those classified files about energy generation, though, and - you tried to shake away the stubborn thought, but it persisted.

There'd been something strange about the readings on one of the War Fleet craft that moved immediately coreward. You'd only caught it because of Captain Peros' exemplary dedication to ensuring the station's sensor net remained at a hundred twenty percent efficiency at all times, but it had been there. When analysed, it pointed to one of the truly ancient War Fleet craft that had been deployed on this mission, part of a storied legacy.

The Light Between Shadows were a legend among the Fleet, and with good reason: their service went all the way back to their actions to prevent the First Sorrow from taking all creation. They'd maintained their purpose as a special combat unit ever since, and had been among the speartip detachments that ended the Battle of the Burning Line. Their defeat to the Fourth Sorrow had been what had ended that war - not that it had truly given its winners victory.

But this time, one of their vessels had radiated a signal that you'd only seen before on the recordings from humanity's home star. The same signal as the human personal assault units that had devastated a Regular Fleet. You'd been curious, wondering what they'd found that could do that, but there was nothing you could find in the recordings that had been passed over by the War Fleet. The Lumen died, the War Fleets retreated, that was it. Or, that was what it had appeared.

There was an awareness among Shiplords that Central Command did not always tell the full truth. Some data was dangerous, but it was also accepted that the Authority held them to account for such things. Still, finding a few fraction of a second cut from the battle footage was...odd. That had to have been ordered before the War Fleet even left Sol. What had they taken?

Alas, that you lacked the time to contemplate it properly. First, came the readings of a focused interstellar transmission, blasting out from the star humans had named Sol to some unknown receiver. It had clearly been directed, however, and that was passed back to Central Command. Likely nothing to truly worry about, there were few races in this sector capable of mounting any challenge to a true detachment of the Regulars. But still a concern. If humanity was sending messages, then they'd found someone to talk to in the cycles since their defeat of the Tribute Fleet. That was unexpected.

Still, you and your fellows continued your work, increasing the strength of the station's defence net and drone swarms until you were forced to send out extraction craft to local star systems to produce more. And you tried, with little success, not to think too hard about the questions plaguing you. Right up until you couldn't avoid them anymore.

It shouldn't have been possible. Tribute Fleet systems were designed to purge all strategic data as they died, and the human fleets had allowed the Regulars to withdraw in good order, taking cripples and all escape pods with them.

But the alarms that howled through the station regardless on that ninth day, ripping you from your contemplation of a broader strategic analysis with Lijthe. The station AI had vanished from your virtual the moment before the alarms sounded, and your own perceptual accelerators kicked in with them. They gave you plenty of time to realise exactly how screwed you all were.

The armada emerging from jump all around you could have put a full Regular Fleet to shame. Three dreadnought squadrons slashed into being right at the edge of your defensive perimeter, and they did not lack for attendants. Their escorts came with them, sharp-toothed destroyers and cruisers to guard them against the swarming mass of drones that Lijthe was already concentrating away from the enemy's point defence envelope. Limpet craft sprang loose from the multi-kilometer dreadnoughts, thickening the layers of protection around them without once interfering with their firing lanes.

Lijthe had opened fire the moment they'd recognised the threat, but the resources of a Relay had never been designed to stand up to even a single squadron of dreadnoughts. Seconds raced tortuously by, and more contacts littered the screen as the sleek patterns of human carrier craft launched their broods. Shoals of missiles thickened the rain of weapons fire sleeting in from all sides, and most of them appeared to be proximity fused antimatter warheads, each detonation another rent in the wall of drone craft that was your only true defence.

The relay defence fleet stood no chance against this, the cruiser component and its escorts brushed contemptuously aside by the human fleet's smaller capital ships. And the relay pulsed beneath your feet, once, twice, three times, the signals that you'd all learned and hoped to never have to send.

Contact. Enemy Overwhelming. Remember Us.

They carried every shred of sensor data that the shattering drone shell could send through the haze of jamming. It tore at your sight despite the station's filters, but you did your job, analysing, tagging ship types and numbers. Trying to see a pattern in their deployment beyond the obvious. That they'd known exactly where to find you.

Then a voice hissed across the stars, as cold as the space between them and twice as deadly. Yet its message was… different to what you'd expected.

"Shiplord relay station. You are incapable of stopping our fleet, but we do not take any joy in murder." Something unsaid snarled beneath those words, you could feel it in the translation - and that had been a human one! "Power down all combat systems, sever your drone links, and you will live. You have until my assault boats reach your station to comply."

"You have no ability to board us." Captain Peros replied. Or began to. A massive energy spike flared from one of the nearer dreadnoughts, and a surge of eye-tearing lightning lashed into the drone cloud. No drone, not even yours, could survive a surge of that magnitude, and chains of fire danced across the rapidly thinning swarm.

"What are you?" You whispered into the net.

"We are humanity." That same, terrible voice replied. Only then did you realise that your question had found the open circuit. "And I am the sword that laid waste to every fleet of yours to enter our home since the first."

A pause, barely enough to begin to breathe out, and with it another realisation. Humanity had developed combat accelerators that were close to matching your own.

"Until my assault boats arrive." Lina Sharpe told you, as another blaze of branching death lanced from her flagship. The supply of Emitters was still far too low to equip even a fraction of her capitals with weapons based on them, but they'd been promised to be a highly effective weapon against the drone clouds. She'd have to get her R&D teams something nice. Then she leaned forward in the virtual command space, watching the defences of the nearest relay to Sol crumble with pitiless eyes, and spoke once more.

"Make your choice."

"Who are you?" you asked. The world was still shifting around you, the implications of non-hostile contact difficult to grasp. What did it mean, what could it do? Yet all of that, unimportant compared to this question.

"Not your use-name," you corrected swiftly. "Every time we've tried to talk to your people, we've had to fight for answers." Desperately needed ones, especially now, but still secondary in this moment. "Who are you?"

The question had implications. Shiplord society was a complicated one, utilising use-names to supply an easily usable mechanism of identification. But that wasn't who someone was, and the Shiplords recognised this. A formal question of identity like the one you'd given wasn't asking Kicha for a name. It was asking her for an explanation of her existence.

Kicha gave the impression of a smile, one full of sadness, and she made another small gesture. Two limbs flowed out from her sides spreading low from her body to make reference to herself.

"I am of the Hearthguard," she told you, the same words as before, but different this time. And not alone. "I was one of them since before the name existed, and of all those first failures, I am one of the last to remain. I commanded one of the ships that enacted the Second Sorrow, and when I looked upon what we had done, I vowed to find a way to do better."

"Instead I am here." If Kicha had been human, that statement would have been a ragged sob, thick with self-loathing. "For half a million cycles I have been this Sorrow's steward, hoping for another to find the way I could not. To prove that there could have been another way, and that softer words could still mean something. I could not count the number of simulations I've witnessed, even those rare ones that pushed the bounds of the simulation."

The veil of nanotech around her swirled close, tightening in under the weight of a guilt too deep for words to express as she struggled with the last words.

:Sidra, can you retract my facial screen?: It could have been a question. It wasn't one, and your Unison partner knew it. Your Masque rolled back, revealing your face, and you stepped forward towards a soul that even now fought not to break under the strain of thousands of millennia. You couldn't help it. Shiplord or not, she had never tried to hurt you.

"They all failed," she said, forcing the words out even as you took a breath of your own in hopes of helping her do so. Her head snapped up as she heard you do it without the mufflers of your Masque, and her own veil spasmed. "You should not do that," she started to say.

"But I will," you told her, shaking your head. The motion was a human one, but that was the point, and everything you could feel told you it was the right one to make. "You have revealed yourself. I will not allow you to do so alone."

You could almost feel the muffled, impotent irritation of Adamant's intelligence section, but you put it out of mind. It wasn't important right now. Showing camaraderie with a potentially invaluable ally was, and you weren't faking.

"They all failed," Kicha repeated, struggling with her fraying voice. "I tried to learn, to apply what they'd shown me, but it wasn't enough. I wasn't enough. And to see you come here and find a way, to chart the path so perfectly that you not simply caution their response, but offer an answer." A Shiplord headshake flickered in the air

"What do you mean?" Vega moved up, the Harmonial's own helm sliding back, a soft touch between your platforms expressing wordless understanding and agreement. Kicha made another gesture, and the holo around you shifted from its default into a strategic projection of the galaxy. You'd seen it before, or Sidra had, in the runthrough the Unison Intelligences had done before you tried your own hand at changing things.

"You won the Contact Fleet free, as so many others have," Kicha explained, sweeping a hand through the regimented order of War Fleets clustering at the Shiplord border. That was as expected, at this point. "But according to the simulation, you also made Sphere's Minds listen."

The border of the Sphere was very different. If you'd remembered correctly, it should be a fifth of the way into the gap between the two polity's territory. Instead, it hadn't moved at all.

"The simulation is as perfect as we can make it," the Shiplord continued. "We've built it from everything we ever recovered about the Hjivin, and with that and the Seventh, the simulations can make incredibly accurate predictions. To delay the war this long is unprecedented. And as I'm sure your," she paused, unsure. "The partner intelligences you carry with you?"

"Unison Intelligences."

"Yes," she said. "I was watching you after the reply you gave me, and saw them show you the war as it had been. I don't think you realise how old that response is." You blinked, and a moment later wondered if the Shiplord would recognise the motion's meaning. She did.

"You gave me a formal recognition phrase that fell out of use over three hundred thousand cycles ago." There was honest laughter in the Shiplord's words, something no human had ever heard. "Perhaps one in every ten million who visit this place know it. Fewer than a hundredth of them use it."

The continued confusion you were feeling must have shown in your face, as the laughter stopped and Kicha peered close. Her Masque shifted, curious, assessing even.

"You didn't know," she said. Behind it came another question, faster than you'd expected. "How didn't you know? Your infiltration in all other aspects was flawless, and only a handful of the Hearthguard here would have recognised your response as archaic instead of simply unusual."

You had no immediate reply. Fortunately, Vega did.

"Does it matter?" the Harmonial asked plainly, blunting the flood of curiosity she could feel rising in the Shiplord. Kicha considered the question, and her veil undulated in a distant cousin to a shrug.

"I suppose not," she admitted, drawing herself back. You almost regretted it. There'd been something remarkably young in the Shiplord's sudden curiosity, as if for a moment she'd not been the ancient, guilt-stricken woman that now reasserted herself. "But to return from my distraction, I believe you can see the change."

She motioned again to the galaxy image, and the distance between the borders of the Sphere and Shiplords. "You know where the lines should be by now. And I think you know what it would mean, too. Our industrial capacity was always so much greater than that of the Sphere, but it was never optimised for wartime production. And the old Regular designs were products of a doctrine that would have been helpless against the Sphere. But with this?"

"It would have won the war for you," Kalilah grumbled, lowering her disruptor. "But how does that help us?"

"Because it might have prevented the war," Mir said, his tone detached, the young man possessed by his Focus as he stared at the imagery. "This shows a frontier. But it also shows the Hjivin the depth of Shiplord strength, and how you found a different way to it. For everything they did to their own people, their guiding minds weren't fools. They'd have realised that they couldn't win a war against you, and recognised that to continue to exist, they would have to change."

"It's not perfect," Kicha warned gently. "But it is far better than any Shiplord ever produced. And a war in this circumstance would be one we could have won on our own, I think. Without having to rely on the Uninvolved to end it, and reveal the strength they truly possess."

The conversation paused as you all considered that. The War itself had changed something in the Shiplords. Kicha hadn't confirmed any specifics, but you could guess. From then on, every newly found polity was another threat that must be confirmed to be otherwise. But its manner of ending had broken something in the species, and nothing in the sim data could tell you what.

"Why is that so important?" You found it surprisingly difficult to hold back the anger you felt in the question. "They saved everything. If the Sphere had completed what they were doing here."

You broke off, shivering at the memory of the twisted, planetary scale murder that had fed the nascent abomination. You didn't notice then, how Kicha reacted, her veil slicing to edges and points like a cornered animal. A memory that you had, the words ran through your head. A memory the Shiplords didn't share. Everything they knew came from what the Uninvolved had told them, and how much had those beings really been able to explain across the barrier between existences?

"You built a way to watch them," you said slowly, eyes widening in horrified realisation. "You forged swords, to strike them down if it looked like they'd ever do it again."

"But did you listen?" Vega broke in aghast, the Harmonial racing ahead of your own thoughts. Finding the links, even before you did. "Did you understand what they tried to tell you? Your history says that the Hjivin were trying to create an Uninvolved, but do you have any idea how they were doing it?"

Kicha had stilled as you asked more questions. She froze into nigh-immobility as Vega asked the last one. There was horror in the Shiplords every facet, but something more, too. Disbelief.

"What do you mean?" She whispered.

"What do you know about what the Hjivin were doing here? Before they were… stopped."

Kicha flinched. "I know what I remember. I was on one of those ships that came here after it all ended. I… the Aspect, it spoke. It said that they had no choice, that they had to prevent the creation of an abomination. We believed it. We did!" You weren't sure if those last words were trying to convince you, or herself.

You shared a look with Vega, another with Mir. If you did this-

:Just tell her, Mandy. : Vega snapped, and you reeled at the vicious heat in her mind-tone. Why was she - oh. You forgot, sometimes, exactly what your friend's Focus really meant. Harmony. The idea of being in agreement, which was founded in understanding. To be staring at the possibility of a misconception that had cost this many lives must have been as sickening to her as a Mendicament was to you.

:How?: you sent in reply, hurling calm and care down the link. Trying to help her stabilise. Being adults didn't even factor into this. It was the nature of a Focus to feel strongly within it. Any of you here could master that, but it could be difficult. As you'd just demonstrated.

:Tell her we found a record on the other world. That we witnessed the event.: Vega bit off the words with surgical precision, trying desperately not to cut you on them :Or just show her what we saw there. You learnt enough from the Marionettes to try.:

:Vega you can't,: raw emotion slammed back at you before you could finish forming her name.

:Amanda, I know you mean well,: she told you with every attempt at gentleness. :But you know as well as I do that if she doesn't understand, she needs to. Use the projectors if you don't want to try connecting to her with Practice, all our platforms can access them. And-:

:And she can tell that you're talking,: Lea said, inserting herself into the conversation with all the subtlety of a thrown brick. :Get on with it.:

"You know something," Kicha stated. "Something about what happened here, something that you think I don't. How can you think I don't? I was there, I listened!" The room rippled in response to her cry, and Kalilah's weapon slid back up. No, you had to defuse this. And that meant you had to explain.

Vega is not going to accept you not explaining what you saw and experienced to Kicha. The major question is how you justify knowing it. You have a few options, thankfully!
[] From What Is - Try to justify your understanding from the later sections of the simulation. You have a different perspective and Kicha knows this, but would it really work.
Vega: You are not great at lying, but if you feel you must.
[] A Hidden Record - Tell Kicha that you found something hidden on the other world of the system, a record that explained in detail what the Sphere was doing.
Amanda: And how do I explain how they never found it?
[] The Truth(Projection) - Show Kicha what you found on the other world, a memory left seared into the world by the actions of the Uninvolved. Use the projection systems of the room to do so.
Lea: Shouldn't we at least try to tell the truth?
[] The Truth(Reverie) - You learnt from the Marionette Observer during Second Contact that it was possible to share memories between races. This could be an extremely blatant use of Practice, but it would make the point impossibly clear.
Kalilah: I'm just going to be over here. Ready to glass the continent.