So this is what I've been thinking of writing all day. Take it as noncanon if you like, but it seems to me a very obvious and believable thing, knowing what we know about the Amarki and the Orions. I doubt that the 2300s are the first time the two species have been in contact. Not by a long shot.
FAIRY TALES, Part 3
USS Enterprise-B
Sydraxian Border Zone
Ensign Dill chim Clunn of the USS
Enterprise, second communications watch, went straight back to her room at the end of her shift. She'd heard the news about the bombing of Lironh. She was pretty sure her roommate had too.
She rushed through the door almost before it could slide open, tripping over herself to reassure, to console. Even knowing Tisana Bessle's family lived on the other side of the planet from the capital, she... worried about the Amarki at times like this.
Her roommate's first words surprised her.
"Dill, slow down. I'm all right." The sensor ensign folded up long limbs, sitting back down on her bunk. Tizzy spent a lot of time sitting down when they talked, while Dill stood. It saved strain on Amarki and Tellarite necks alike.
Dill's confusion curled up into a knot.
We get ordered out of a pursuit action, and she collapses in tears. Hundreds of thousands dead in the capital of her own homeworld, and she holds together. Dill had known plenty of Amarki at the Academy, and she'd served with them on the
Enterprise for years now. Sometimes, she didn't understand them.
"I'm glad you're okay." Dill knew
that much. "I came straight here because..."
"Because you were worried." Tisana turned slowly to face the Tellarite squarely, her eyes surprisingly dry, her chest quivering with a stifled laugh. "You are without a doubt the kindliest Tellarite I've ever met."
"Thanks." Dill felt her lips curving
far up into a satisfied grin, one with a different flavor than her last smile. "I win a
lot of arguments by putting people off balance. There's an ancient human saying about that, I heard it in San Francisco. It's, um, um... You catch more insects with sugar than with acid!"
"True, that. Which reminds me of what I
hope the Confederacy does."
Now Dill was starting to worry again. Tizzy could be a bit... odd, about things like this. "What's that?"
"Grind the Syndicate slowly, but finely, and be the very milk of kindness to every one of those poor green fellows under its thumb. What else?"
"That's- generous of you."
I really, REALLY don't understand Amarki.
"I'd be just delighted if we were, Dill. Because I will be so very,
very happy if the Orions expect us to savage them. Dread it, even. Lock their doors and shiver... and then we don't. There's an itch in my bones that it would scratch, you see, for we and the Orions have a history."
"A history?" Dill found listening to people very easy, and letting her tall, volatile roommate tell a story was one of the best ways to get something out of her system. She settled in and got ready to listen.
"Remember, my kind little friend, the Rigel sector is clear on the other side of Federation space from the Orions' worlds. Even so, Orions owned those stars in fee simple, once, when even the Vulcans were not so old a race. Amarkia is but a quarter the distance from Alukk; think you they never found us? There's a good reason our lords and ladies agreed to join a nation that honors your 'Prime Directive...' " Tisana muttered that last sentence darkly.
"I... didn't know. What happened?" Dill blinked.
"It hasn't made its way into Academy history, yet, but I'm sure it will one of these years. You see, the Orions didn't start thinking it was fun to kidnap and enslave my people just last year. Or just last century, for that matter. There's a word for Amarki in old Orion. They call us
'pretty savages'."
The last time Dill had seen Tisana smile like that, the woman had had her hand on her dagger. Her ears flexed. "That's horrible!"
"What? I like being called pretty." Tizzy laughed bitterly, ironically, her grim, set rictus fading a bit. "And there's a word for Orions in half the old languages of Amarkia- though not mine; they never raided the Ghastar Islands for slaves. It doesn't translate very well. Earth has an equivalent. We called the Orions...
elves."
"Er... don't humans call
you that?"
"Sometimes. I laugh every time I hear it." The grimness was gone, now, her roommate changeable as the wind- as usual. "But think about it. The Orions had disruptors, transporters, drugs on top of the miasma of them. Imagine how they seemed to us, forty generations past."
"Supernatural creatures?"
"Aye, people from another realm of reality, whose homes could never be found no matter how one beat the bushes. Creatures with powers to enchant, beguile, hypnotize. Who think your finest devices and artworks are like trash compared to theirs. Who wield terrible magics, laugh at locked doors, against whom bow and sword are almost worthless. Who steal children, mothers, whole villages when they can get away with it. If the Orions had visited Tellar a thousand years ago, your ancestors would have spoken of them the same way. Maybe they did."
"Did they take over the planet?" Dill was pretty sure she'd have heard about
that, and she hadn't.
"No, we were lucky in that. My world had little the Empire wanted in those days, save perhaps our own bodies. The scholars wrote of conjuring up elves- or demons. Of magical devices. Some say that they taught us the use of gunpowder, the compass, the germ theory of disease. Others doubt it. I know a man who's spent half his life trying to prove that Orions built the tombs of the Twelve Kings in the Vale of Selessaya."
"Did they?"
She shook her head. "No, though they did sell the Kings a set of tritanium-bladed rock saws. The merchants took notes on their dealings with green demons. The lawmen recorded kidnappings and strange happenings, the doing of mysterious enchantresses. The nobles wrote of armies wiped out by sorcerors. And then... it ended. The elves stopped visiting- their empire fell. In our Atomic Age, we looked back and thought it was all superstition. Little green women? Impossible! Tells us what
they knew."
"Mm. Do you blame them?"
"No." Her nod was curt, tense; the grimness had come back a little, though Dill didn't know why.
"A lot of cultures go through times of not believing in aliens. It's ironic, I guess."
More grimness. "Aye, that.
Ironic. You see, it wasn't until we got out into the stars that we found out what had happened to us... and how few of our cousins kidnapped to the stars remained alive, after a thousand years of isolation, and more."
"What did your government do, when you found out?"
"Less than you'd think. We were learning about it more from archaeology than anything else. The Orions must have been surprised to see 'pretty savages' in space, with atomics, instead of on our homeworld, slaughtering each other with cold steel. I don't think they wanted to tell us anything we hadn't worked out for ourselves. I don't blame them. Even though there was no one left alive of the old 'elves' to take our forfeits from." She laughed. "We don't have to take a thing, to have a bit of revenge. I imagine they've been expecting us to fall upon them in thunder and wrath- and savagery, of course- for fifty years now. Righteousness has its own rewards, don't you think? But we haven't forgotten. No."
That... would explain a lot of things. Dill thought. About the way Tisana talked about Orions. About the way the whole Amarki species
acted about Orions. "But your... diaspora? What happened to them all? How many-"
"
Too many. The fall of the Empire, it can't have been kind to Amarki slaves. Too many of them were kept in palaces as ornaments, drugged quiet, from what I've heard. Then the Hur'q came down, and broke Orion power, and I imagine most of our poor cousins had lost too much of their skill at arms to survive. Not
quite all, though." Tizzy's lips skinned back in that dagger-grin of hers. "Our first warp-drive ships didn't
found our first colony at Selindra, you see. They
discovered it. We'd taken it centuries earlier- at sword's point, in a slave revolt. That was eight years before Salnas proved our world orbited its star..." She trailed off.
"Space colonies. Before heliocentrism." Dill tilted her head, and Tizzy nodded. "That sounds like it must be some kind of record." Dill was going to look all this up to check it, but the Amarki didn't have her 'storytelling' face on. Not at all.
"The Selindrans had the flame in their hearts, but they lost most of their technology, such as they had. They hadn't been trusted with it, the lot of them knew barely enough to seize a few liners and evict the scattering of Orions on an empty planet- who were in poor shape to fight back. I suppose that tale, too, may have been part of why so few of our other cousins survived the fall of the Empire. They learned to be afraid of the 'pretty savages.' A woman has as many enemies as she has slaves, after all." Tizzy's eyes twinkled- merrily, but with a hard glint to them. "You know, I never thought of that before. If it's true, though, I imagine the other exiles in Elfland died gallantly, which is worth a bit."
The tall, slender woman leaned her head in one powder-blue hand, propped on her knee as she shifted a bit on the bunk, staring at the opposite bulkhead. Dill frowned. "What's on your mind?"
"It's odd to think, but in another universe, perhaps it would have been
we the Hur'q drafted as fighting-slaves, instead of the Klingons, and
we who fought the high crusade to drive them from the quadrant- then learned star travel from them." Tisana's shoulders twitched, and she smiled oddly. "But if wishes were gold..."
