The Secrets' Crusade

You looked at the storage device, a relatively tiny thing in your pale-skinned hand. Would it really have all the answers you needed? It was hard to tell. But Entara wasn't just giving you that and telling you to leave. They were offering explanations, education from a mind so old that you could barely conceptualise it. And for all that Insight had given you, everything that you'd found in these Sorrows, there was still terribly much about the Shiplords that was opaque to you.

You could feel that restrained curiosity reflected in those others with you, between them churning to find questions that you needed answered. And from them all, one rose to the top. It was a mystery as old as humanity's first contact with the Shiplords, a warning included within the Directives that none of the Group of Six had ever tested despite it never being explained.

As places to start went, it was an excellent one.

"When a Tribute Fleet passes down the Shiplord directives, they include a warning at the end, something of the Directives but not itself a promise of genocide if broken," you said. The others nodded, and you continued. "It warns of peril to any who look or linger in the spaces between stars. Why?"

"Because it makes you easier to find," Entara replied immediately, a shadow flickering across their face. "You truly didn't know?"

"It's that simple?" You asked - demanded really. After all that, decades of fear, all for nothin- You cut the thought away.

"Not entirely," more shadows flickered as they spoke. "It's certainly easier to eradicate a species if they don't hide away between stars, but it also provides a line of fear that few ever cross. It's a chain that is never cut, and I believe acts as a final barrier to any race attempting to fight for true freedom. The cruel trick is how it's so vague. Placed alongside directives with extermination as the price of breaking them, it suggests the cost to be similar. "

"Is there truly nothing out there?" Mary sounded as disappointed as you'd ever heard her in your life.

"The Neras sometimes meet there," Entara told you. You remembered that name from Insight reports. The only known contemporary of the Shiplords, they were a sentient fungus with seeming innate mastery of the First Secret. Exactly how they had that, no one knew. "But that's all I'm aware of, and I'm aware of a great deal. For all that they did, the Shiplords didn't skimp on the education they offered us. I've spent decades at a time out in the dark spaces between suns, and nothing came for me."

"Well that's...supremely disappointing," Vega said. Entara shrugged helplessly, using the human motion deliberately. It was comforting, but only so much so given how limited you felt on questions. This Sorrow had gone very quickly, no days of time, but every one of them took almost a week to move to and from the Stellar Exclusion Zone. And each week past meant another week that Earth might fall in.

"I'm sorry, truly," your guide said. Then, rallying, she asked: "What about your next question?"

"Why do they call themselves Shiplords?" Mary asked. "That can't be the original name of their species; it's too deliberate."

"Indeed it isn't," Entara bowed their head in acknowledgement. Again lights flashed, this time signifying agreement.

"Then...why?" Mary asked again.

"My people believed it was because they were the first race in the galaxy to unlock FTL travel, but a few million cycles teaches you some things." There was a flash of conciliation, and you restrained a wince. Again, really? "Someone gave them the name, long before they ever met our species. For all intents and purposes, it is the name of their species now."

"Who?" you asked, in the same moment as half the room.

"All I have is a name. Anything else -- who they were, what they were to the Shiplords, what happened to them -- it's all guesswork." Entara took a breath. "But I can tell you this, they were important to the Shiplords in a way that I can't even describe. Like no two races I've ever seen. And they were called the Consolat."

Now that, that was something you might be able to use. An ancient ally or friend, gone for millions of cycles. Had they been killed by the Shiplords? Died? Chosen to go Uninvolved? It was impossible to tell, just as it would be to bring up the matter with any Shiplord you were going to meet at the next Sorrow. And yet... Tahkel had said to look for a path out from war. Could more information about a race that the Shiplords had considered friends illuminate one?

"Thank you." It was the least you could say, and this was new knowledge. If it would end up being useful was another matter, of course, but you'd been told to learn the Shiplords' past. The Sorrows could never have been all of what mattered, and you'd never known what else there might be until now. That was worth, or could be worth, far more than you could know right now. It was frustrating to have to wait, of course, but more points of enquiry were undoubtedly a good thing right now.

"Next question," you said. "The Shiplords ban races from full access to the Second Secret even after finding their freedoms, but what about here? What has become of that Secret in Shiplord civilisation?"

"That is," Entara sighed. "Complicated would be the best description. The Shiplords don't create life like most younger races do. They don't build bioforms to task, and our technological base is firmly rooted in mechanics instead of conventional biology."

"Conventional biology?" Mary pounced on the qualifier like a particularly hungry cat, and you could feel her eyes gleaming behind the veil of her nanoshell Masque.

"Yes," Entara nodded. "The vast majority of Shiplord technology operates on biomechanical principles, and it couldn't do that without the Second Secret. There's a broad level of self-modification within society, but with all the legacy geneware and millions of cycles to experiment it's rare that anyone comes up with something new. The nanoshells we all have are mixed Sixth and Second secret too, but the Shiplords are much more attached to them. They're bonded to the user early on in childhood, using their own genetic structure as a starting point.

"It's actually quite fascinating but," they sighed. "Really, if you want the specifics I'd read the files I've given you. I could explain it, and I'd be happy to under normal circumstances, but..."

"These aren't normal circumstances," you finished. Another flicker of light and colour - a nod.

:Sorry Mary,: you sent.

:It's alright,: she replied. :It'll give me some things to read on our way outsystem.:

"Yes," Entara agreed, unaware of or simply not remarking on your microsecond pause. "Next question?"

"We've heard a lot of references to the Authority," Vega stepped in. "But we still don't know what that actually means, or what Shiplord governance is like. If we're going to end this war, we need to know the system we'll have to work within to get there. I'm not asking for everything, just a grounding in how it all works. We've had our own guesses, but it's good to be certain."

"That, I can help you with," Entara nodded eagerly. How they could do that with just light patterns was astounding to you. "The Shiplords are largely democratic as a polity, with star systems electing delegates to the Authority in rolling votes. Delegates act as the voice of those who elected them and handle primary governance within the polity. Compared to your own political system, we would probably seem to have very few of them at a national scale, but limited telepresence is possible through the FTL communications network the Shiplords began building long before they met us. In truth, the Authority is both its delegates, and all those who voted for them."

"So when you say you will be standing in front of the Authority?" Vega prompted.

"I will be standing in a room with no more than a few hundred sophonts," Entara told you. "With tens of billions of observers watching, and making limited opinions known to their delegates."

"Why limited?"

The explanation to that, it seemed, was bandwidth. The Shiplord communications web was a marvel of redundant engineering, though you'd already known a little of that. But it was limited, in the end, still data limited. Members of the Authority shaped policy, created and passed laws, all with a working group of relatively minuscule size compared to that of Shiplord civilisation. But they did so in an environment of near-total transparency, able to draw upon the collective experience of billions of their own people, many of whom would often have relevant experience to the task. Closed votes did exist, but they were extremely rare.

At the same time, true e-democracy remained beyond them, despite all their technological capacity. It was humbling really. Millions of years of development, and still defeated by the vastness of space. It was a reminder of the awesome scale of the universe, and also a chilling one of how the Shiplords had been acting on that scale for longer than humanity had existed. And still they'd found limits.

Yet for all of those, species-scale votes were entirely within their means. If necessary, bandwidth could be diverted for full debates at a polity scale, the very idea of which gave you a headache. The more important details were how Entara described a civilisation caught in a trap of their own making, with a significant minority desperate to escape but unable to provide a solution. That, it seemed, was why your success at the Third Sorrow was so important. If a possible solution could be found for the Sphere, then surely one would be possible for the rest of the galaxy. On its own, not enough. But presented at the right time...

It was a ray of hope, glimmering through a dark night.

"For any details you'll really have to look at the files I've given you," Entara said at last. You'd transitioned from standing to sitting during the explanation, and the seat had adjusted quickly to your unique - to it - physiology. It was comfortable without that becoming a distraction, which was really quite impressive. "But that should be at least a bare-bones image of what you're dealing with. Was there anything else? I'd rather not keep you any longer than I have to. I'm going to have my own preparations to make."

"One last one," you said. "The oaths you swear, that all the Hearthguard swear, what are they?"

"A bit of an odd question," Entara remarked. But it didn't stop them from continuing. "We swear to enshrine and protect the knowledge of the Sorrows. We swear to guide all those who visit them, an unchanged loophole from times when they were open to other races that I believe is how Kicha will be able to eventually justify your survival."

"Oh," Mary said, in a very small voice.

"Indeed," your host chuckled. "And we swear to answer all questions and to offer no falsehoods, but only of the Sorrow we guard."

"Why prevent speaking of others?" you asked. "Wouldn't it be easier to be totally open?"

"Because it's a journey of discovery." The reply came immediately and without hesitation. "The order is up to the traveller, but each Sorrow is designed to teach a particular lesson. They don't really do so properly, not anymore, but at least some of it still makes it through. It's about preparing our visitors for the world beyond and helping them to understand the sacrifices that have been made to protect it. Our oaths prevent anyone from skipping to the end, and that matters because if you just skip to the truth without knowing how to understand you'll learn nothing. And if you learn nothing, all the sacrifices recorded in these places are worth the same.

"The entire point of the Hearthguard was to try and protect the soul of the Shiplord people. We've ultimately failed, but what we still have is ours to keep. If we gave up, then the last hope of peace would go with it. We never believed that peace would come from within at this point, either. We hoped that one day we'd be able to use what hoarded leverage still remained to make the Authority listen when, well," Entara waved a hand across the room at you and your companions. "someone like you happened."

You took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I think I get it now," you said. "At least a little."

"A little is all you can hope for, for now, I think," Entara said kindly. "But you're almost there, and the Fourth should bring it together. Each story is part of a larger whole, and together they're more than their sum. I believe that, at least. And I think you will too. We failed to in our duty, but the first step to fixing what was broken is to understand it. And you can't without all the Sorrows taken together."

"Then I will hope that what awaits at the Fourth will be everything you've promised," you replied.

"Remember," Entara said, rising to escort you back to the Adamant. "Ask Yarin for the last memory."

"We shall."

The pressure hit you the moment you were back on the Adamant. You could feel it in your chest, the way it seemed to push against the skin of your bones, threatening to crush you. The scale of what you were trying to understand, what you were facing. But it was a battle of mending now, and you knew those far better than any human alive. The Elder First had laid the seeds of humanity's restoration, but it had been you who'd tended to it through its fragile growth. You understood, or thought you did, where this was going.

You still had a great many questions about the specifics, and you would need those to be answered. But if it was truly so simple as offering a solution - a real solution, that the Shiplords could feel safe accepting - then you believed you might be able to handle that. Not now, there were still pieces missing. But at the right time, and in the right place, it was possible.

"Jane, set course for the system shell," you called the moment you were back aboard. Your Masque flickered free of your Aegis, restored only for the walk back to the docking area. "We're done here."

"Yes ma'am." There was a moment of silence, then a question you'd expected. "Were you successful?"

"I think so," you looked between the rest of the team. Iris was still neck deep in her calculations and translations, soon to be finished if the report she'd just transmitted held true. The rest, it would've been hard to tell without the constant presence of the links between your Heartcircle. And Mary, well, you knew her even better. They were all confused, frustrated with the mystery that Kicha and Entara had perpetuated. But answers were finally starting to make their way free of the cloudy mess that had been all you'd really been certain of before.

Although there was an addition to the questions now. The Consolat, the race who'd named the Shiplords. Who had they been? And how had they died? Perhaps Iris would be able to tell you. If not, you could only hope that the Fourth Sorrow would.

Of all the things you'd been prepared for, Iris coming to your door well into the early morning the second day after you departed Last Cry wasn't one of them. You could tell that she'd been crying, but not the reason. There was a deep sorrow radiating out from your daughter as she fell into your arms, but it was one she'd already survived. You were wise enough to recognise that trying to wrap your daughter up in your arms and not let go until she could smile again wouldn't be helpful right now. But you still wanted to do it.

You settled for holding her while she recovered herself enough to talk.

"I'll be calling a meeting about this tomorrow," were the first words out of your daughter's mouth. You'd seated her at one of the couches in your living area. There was a small table between them, large enough for small presentations. Tonight it was doing double duty as a chair for Mary, who'd taken up a watchful post right across from Iris - close enough to catch her if the tears started again.

"You finished working on it, didn't you," Mary said. Her fingers dug at the fabric of her off-duty dress, creasing it heavily. "The archive Vega was able to recover from the First Sorrow. You found a way to make it make sense."

"I did."

The distinct lack of unprompted explanation was worrying. "What was it?" you asked, settling onto the sofa next to your guest. Iris looked over at you, her eyes utterly haunted, and you suddenly realised that they were also entirely still. "Iris, what did you find?"

"It's…" She made a frustrated gesture in the air, and you felt her access the suite's systems. She tapped into the holographic array, transmitting enough data that it took the system several full seconds to load it all into buffers. Then she swept an extended finger from left to right, and the world around you filled with light. Concentric rings of streaming glyphs spiralled out from a point centred on your daughter's hand, interlocking and criss-crossing like a madman's vision of an atom. The data was constantly changing, taking new forms, and seemed utterly chaotic.

It was funny sometimes, how easy it was to make something seem that way.

Before you could do more than start to parse the pattern -

:Patterns,: Sidra whispered to you, awe flooding your connection to the Unison. :Thousands of them.:

- Iris swept her finger back to centre and closed her hand over her heart. The swirling diorama around her locked in place and translations crept into Shiplord glyphs, spreading from a dozen spots like sparks scattered across tinder.

"What you all recovered from the First Sorrow was impossibly complex," Iris said, adopting a lecturing tone. "Enough that it took me several million iterations to figure out that understanding it couldn't be done by trying to compile it into new data structures. I had to work out how to use the one that was already there."

"And that leads to this," Mary waved a hand about the quarters.

"It does." Iris nodded. "Sunset and the rest of our onboard intelligence section would've found their way to this answer eventually; I know them well enough to be certain of that. But it would've taken them a great deal of time, and I'm no longer sure that's something we have. Insight gave us some pieces and the Sorrows have given us more, but we've been looking at the puzzle all wrong from the start."

That was a statement that needed more unpacking to understand, and you both said so. Iris grimaced. "Shiplord history prior to the First Sorrow was largely opaque to us even after our visit. Warden Rinel told us that the reason it broke their civilisation so badly was that it forced them to choose, but that on its own shouldn't have been enough to trigger the scale of trauma we've just witnessed. Watching all reality almost be destroyed at the mad whims of another is bad, but they had an answer to it ready. That doesn't explain the scale of their response."

"Reality-destroying weapons don't justify a genocidal response?" Mary asked. She shook her head at your look. "Mandy, you know I wouldn't ever want to call for it, but it's...not as unreasonable as we've been trying to tell ourselves it was."

"No, it's not," Iris agreed. "But there is genocidal and there is berserk. The Shiplords in their campaign against the Gysians were the second, mothers, not the first. And that sort of response from a species so dedicated to stability and relative peace until then can't come from nowhere."

You didn't reply at first, letting your mind follow the logic as Iris kept talking. Placing together possibilities from what you'd found at the Sorrows, what each of them had told you, what each person you'd revealed yourselves to had told you. None of the conclusions were certain, but if they were... If they were you could understand why Iris had said you might be lacking time.

"...the Sorrows chart the path of the Shiplords' fall," Iris was still speaking. "But there's a broader shape beneath it, that stretches much further back in time, to the founding point of this gestalt. The amount of direct data on that is extremely limited, but it's more than we had before."

"How sure are you about this?" You asked, sweeping your own eyes across the data labyrinth. "Not just the data as a whole, but the specific pieces you've found."

"I found a name," Iris replied. "The same one we were told here, by Entara: Consolat. And that makes me trust it, and her, far more than we were planning to."

You nodded absently, staring deeper into the patterns around you, trying to make sense of it all. Harmony wasn't your Focus, and though you'd come closer to widening your Focus than any Potential known, you'd never gotten all the way there. But this, all around you? You couldn't understand it as data, but you could feel it. A swirling gestalt of a species older than humanity could properly comprehend; every triumph, every downfall, every simple day.

How much could Project Insight's predictions have been thrown off by the lack of this data? Could they have been thrown off at all? It was difficult to tell. The project couldn't predict how things might change; the alterations to the Second Battle of Sol's Shiplord battle line had proven that. But that was missing choices made after the fact. Could it have missed something from before?

It missed the Sorrows, you noted, but had that truly led you astray? Nothing you'd found so far had implied more than a far more complex fall to ruin than you'd expected. Unless what Iris had found- you shook your head.

"I've gone back and looked since," your daughter added, her silver-hued eyes still frozen. "There's nothing referencing the Consolat in any of the archives I've been able to get into, not even obliquely. I think that means the data is kept in Shiplord personal files, within the Masques. That might be why the Tribute Fleet…weren't willing to surrender."

"But that can't just be all," you noted, cocking your head as Iris nodded agreement. "What else, love?"

"There are references," she said, nodding at the now fully translated data entries filling the air around you. "The archive files here now are the ones that the structure will decrypt if I run it all the way back to its founding point. The data interface is honestly fascinating, even if I had to work out how the Shiplords reference spacetime coordinates to get it to work.

"But the references themselves point to-"

"They're the root of it," Mary interrupted. You looked up at your oldest friend, and saw her eyes very wide, darting between the data points with a swiftness that made you certain she'd activated her perceptual accelerators.

Her words were disjointed and shaky, as if she'd found the thread of some arcane vein of prophecy, but it did nothing to stop her talking. "The root of everything. The trauma, the actions to teach, to protect, to…control. They're gone now, and that made the Shiplords rage against those who would destroy any more of reality. Gone somehow, somehow familiar to the earliest Sorrows. That's why the Shiplords reacted as they did to the Gysians. They could dress it up, make other reasons stick, but it wasn't fear that made the Second happen."

Her eyes tracked back down to you, still so wide. "It was pain."

"Pain," you said slowly. Then much more quickly. "Like loss?"

Mary nodded jitterily, forcing her eyes shut, making herself take a breath. "We've been looking at the Sorrows like they were the cause for everything the Shiplords have done. Like they were the source of what turned them into what they are now. But what if they're just waystations on the path, not the beginning? What if that trauma we've seen in every interaction began with the loss of the race that Entara implied were their oldest friends?

"Do you think we'd do any better, after a few million years?" She took another breath, then another and slowly the shuddering faded. Faster after you placed a steady hand on her shoulder. You'd only seen this from Mary a handful of times in all the years you'd known her, and part of you truly hoped that this hadn't been a similar episode of interconnective genius. Because if she was right, well.

"We shouldn't think too much on what it could be," Iris said, before you could lose yourself to that very thing. "We don't know enough, not really. Mary could be right," and probably was, you didn't say, "but that's only one interpretation. There are others, and they're just as worthy of consideration until we have more data."

You made yourself nod along, though you were certain that it wasn't quite the truth. Not because you didn't believe in her theory, but because you knew you wouldn't be able to stop yourself from thinking about it. You knew you'd be thinking about it again and again, trying to find a flaw in her reasoning, and every time you couldn't you'd have to fight to not become more certain of her rightness.

"But," Iris admitted, frowning. "I think mom's right about one thing: We're not going to finish our journey at the Fourth Sorrow. They might not call it the same thing, but there's another system like these five, hidden so long ago that none of Uninvolved remember it being there before."

"And that's where we're going to have to go," you sighed, bowing your head. "Where would we even begin?"

None of you got much sleep that night and the command meeting on the day proved to be a difficult one. You'd acquired information, but no ability to do anything with it. Just more mysteries on the pile, though Iris had argued that this at least had some pointers to what it meant. That was true, but as Lina had said:

"Until I can point this ship at an answer, I'm not sure how much any of this helps."

The statement hadn't been entirely fair, and she'd apologised for it despite clearly not meaning it with any cruelty. But it had summed up well the issues still facing you, as the Adamant moved steadily out from the Second Sorrow towards the system's shell. Another day and you'd be jumping to the Fourth, and all you had was a direction to ask for something there. You had guesses now of what that question would lead to, and that was something. It just wasn't what you needed.

Until you actually had that, Consolat was a name and nothing more. Mary had a hypothesis, and you trusted her to be very likely right, but that wasn't a certainty. If she was wrong, then what awaited you at the Fourth would be a surprise. No one in the know was quite sure if you wanted that surprise or not. Because if she was right...

Humanity knew the power of loss. They knew it deep, deep down in their bones, where the foundations of the new world you'd helped birth had been placed by the Elder First. You knew it in the memory of those taken, in the pain and love that all who had died were still held with today. And, for just a few from the billions of humanity, you knew the power of loss in one place more: your souls.

The Dragons had given themselves, together with those who flew them, to give your people Practice.

The Shiplord who'd led the Tribute Fleet defeated in the Second Battle of Sol had said something to you: How dare you profane that gift and persist.

It was all conjecture. All of it. But you couldn't escape the possibility that it might be right. What had the Consolat given, with their loss?

A day more to the jump threshold, you told yourself. Maybe two, three more to reach whatever installation existed at the Fourth. Then, you hoped, you'd get some answers.