- - -
POV: Arthur Sinclair.
President Arriston sat behind his desk, staring at me and Slightly Overweight, who was floating at my side. Arriston smiled at the Huragok. "You wished to speak with me?"
Slightly Overweight whistled loudly, and both Arriston and I read from our flexis. "I wish to produce more Huragok, but I would like assurances that my children will be treated well."
Arriston blinked and smiled. "Of course; you've only been with us for a few months now, and you've already cut many of our more ambitious engineering projects in half. I will give any assurances that are within my power."
Slightly Overweight wasted no time in stating his requirements. Some things were simple; equal treatment under the law and citizenship being the most obvious. Then there were the more specific requests.
A huragok shouldn't be forced to fight against their will; Slightly Overweight was not asking for immunity from conscription, but for immunity from frontline combat; a Huragok would usually be more than happy to work on any engineering project, and if that meant working on a military project, then so be it.
A Huragok should be provided sufficient material so that it can work on engineering projects; Slightly Overweight had to explain that this was vital to the wellbeing of a Huragok; those that could not work typically suffered from mental instability which could persist for years.
His last request was reproductive autonomy. Huragok could reproduce asexually, but doing so too frequently had deadly consequences. According to Slightly Overweight, the agreed upon maximum was three, any more than that usually resulted in the parent Huragok dying within days.
Arriston nodded as he read the last of the requests. "These should all be doable. Can you give me a few days to get this confirmed with the others?"
Slightly Overweight whistled in affirmation. "Take all the time you need."
Next, we just had to wait a few hours for Arriston to do his thing. Of course, this was precisely when we were interrupted by the first big breakthrough in the search for the Last Baol.
Both Slightly Overweight and I had been requested, so we took the stargate to the world where the Baol expedition was underway. We found ourselves in the middle of nowhere, with plains extending far beyond the horizon.
The ground near the stargate was freshly unearthed, the device having just been moved. A few hundred meters before us was a massive hole in the ground. It had clearly been made in just the last few hours; in the hole, a couple hundred people were busy digging away.
Eamon was waiting for us and approached the moment he saw us. He reached out his hand as he walked up to me. "Arthur. It's good to see you."
I smiled and took his hand. "Same here. It's been more than a year now, hasn't it?"
He nodded. "It has. Come on, let me show you what we've found."
He led the way into one of the Al'kesh parked nearby. We walked up the ramp and into one of the ship's internal storage rooms. A series of tables had been placed in the room, and there was a collection of boxes open on each of the tables.
I raised an eyebrow, but approached the first box. Inside was a strangely shaped piece of stone. It almost looked like a Compad, but fossilized. My head snapped back to Eamon. "Is this what I think it is?"
Eamon gestured at the tablet. "Why don't you tell me; you're the expert on alien technology."
With care, I placed my hand on the tablet. The Celestial Forge immediately sent a notification through my head. I touched the next few fossils so that I could get the entire blueprint.
First Perk Activated. Complete Blueprint Acquired: Baol Biocomputer.
Logic Nodes, Memory Lattice, Baol Root Interface, Cambium Self-Repair Layer,
I was fascinated by the device. The biocomputer wasn't really a single uniform device. Each of the individual machines was slightly different; some had more computing ability, some had more memory, and some were more durable. The individual computer must have been grown for whatever individual need it was required for.
I looked through the remaining few samples and spoke to Slightly Overweight, who had been following beside me. "I think some of these may have intact data. We're going to have to break some of them open."
I turned back to Eamon. "We're going to take these back and start analyzing them."
He nodded. "Understood. I'll have some people transport them back to Kaelastrum. We're still finding these things, so I expect that we'll find at least a few more."
I closed the lid of the most intact of the devices and prepared to return to Kaelastrum, only to stop when I had a thought. "These were only used by the very youngest Baol, those who had yet to fully connect with the rest of the hive."
A sad smile graced Eamon's lips for a few moments. "Yeah. We found a site on the other side of the planet where a bunch of adult Baol turned themselves into a beacon. They tried to attract the Grunurs' attention away from the seedlings. It didn't work, but they certainly tried."
I sighed and returned through the stargate. I requisitioned one of the various empty rooms that had been built into the cliff side, and we got to work. Slightly Overweight immediately started slowly deconstructing the device so that he could get an understanding of how it worked, but he was clearly unfamiliar with organic technology.
About 20 minutes later, the rest of the fossils were brought into the room. I had been hoping that with Slightly Overweight's help, we could have a translation program ready in a couple of minutes, but it looked like the deconstruction work would take a few hours at bare minimum.
- - -
POV: James Cromwell. A day later.
I was utterly speechless. Just three days earlier, the last member of the Manassas crew had been revived. My good mood had lasted until just a few hours ago when ST01 had returned with the data they had recovered from ComStar.
The HPG was developed during the Star League's so-called "Good Years" (2600 to 2650) as a method to send communications at faster than light speeds. They replaced the previous "pony express" method, where all communications had to be sent via courier ship.
By the time of the Amaris Civil War in 2766, the Star League Communication Network, known as SLCOMMNET, had an HPG station on every inhabited world in the Inner Sphere and the Periphery. The network was heavily damaged during the Civil War.
Before Operation EXODUS in 2784 and the start of the Succession Wars, the last act of the Star League council was the selection of Jerome Blake to restore the HPG network.
The last I had heard of it as we were leaving the Inner Sphere, he was undertaking that Herculean task. He had certainly succeeded. In 2785, he had taken control of Terra with the support of what SLDF troops remained in the Inner Sphere and declared the world neutral territory.
The Great Houses were all too busy staring warily at each other to risk taking back Terra. So, ComStar was founded. With Jerome Blake's death in 2819, Conrad Toyama took over; he turned the organization into a religious order, named Blake a saint, and turned the position of "Prime Administrator" into the "Primus". Reading ComStar's history was like reading a joke, with each successive Primus being more fanatical than the last.
What I was reading was just the material that was circulated among the lower echelons; those who didn't know ComStar's true secrets, and even this stuff revealed some truly brutal truths if you just read between the lines.
They worshiped the machines they worked on; performing religious rites to sanctify them. As far as I could tell, they truly believed those rites had an actual effect.
There was an uncanny resemblance to what I had read of the Adeptus Mechanicus. While ComStar worshiped the individual machines rather than the concept of a machine god, they both had very similar rituals, attire and aesthetic.
Even worse, we knew the warp existed, or at least some version of it. There was a genuine chance that a warp entity that was brought into existence through worship was supporting ComStar's endeavors in the Inner Sphere.
There were a lot of unanswered questions, and every possible answer just created more questions.
With a deep breath, I turned off the flexi and sat back in my chair. Arthur's meta-knowledge had been correct in a lot of places, but there had also been a lot of errors. The videos that the Asgard had pulled from Arthur's mind — both the Tex Talks and the Battletech: Lore & History videos — had been incredibly detailed, and both had offered a significant insight into the Inner Sphere.
What truly frightened me, however, was that day by day and hour by hour, all of it was looking to be more and more real.
It had been everything and more that Kerensky had feared would come to pass when he put Operation EXODUS into motion. Even worse, if the information was true, then the same thing had happened to the Exodus remnants, and for them it had been even worse.
I let out a sigh; Arriston would want a presentation on what had been recovered. Of course, all of my internal musings were interrupted when one of Arriston's aides barged into the room. "The president has asked me to inform you that the Asgard have made contact and are asking for a meeting."
I immediately stood up and rushed past the aide. Within moments, I was in the president's office. A video displaying an Asgard was on the screen. I still couldn't tell them apart, despite my best efforts to distinguish their appearances.
As I took a seat, the Asgard inclined his head slightly. "Since our last meeting, we have eradicated the Replicator threat. Our fleet will pass through the Milky Way, and we hope for you to introduce us to the Curator Enclave, the Tok'ra, as well as the people of Pangar."
Arriston turned to one of his aides. "Go get the other staff. We're going to be contacting as many people as we can." He rushed out of the room as quickly as he could, and Arriston nodded. "We'll see what we can do."
The Asgard, whom I assumed to be Thor, continued. "We owe your people a great debt. We do not forget our obligations. We wish to aid your people however we can."
I smiled bitterly. "You've already told us you can't offer us anything. What are you permitted to do?"
"My previous inability to aid you was because of a lack of resources. We are more than capable of assisting you in transferring personnel from your homeworld. Should you need it, we can also move your vessels anywhere in the Milky Way galaxy."
I immediately turned to Arriston and whispered in his ear. "We didn't send nearly enough vessels on the initial expedition to the Inner Sphere. We could move the Manassas and the Cobalt Eye back to the Inner Sphere immediately."
Arriston nodded and turned back to Thor. "To begin with, we request a copy of the Protected Planet's Treaty, but other than that we need a few hours to figure out what we need moved."
The flexi connected to the communication stone flashed, and Thor continued. "I have transmitted the text of the Protected Planet's Treaty. Our fleet is still undergoing repairs. It will be three days before they are ready to depart. Contact us once you know what you require from us."
With that, Thor ended the call, and both Arriston and I stood up. Arriston nodded at me. "Gather the command staff. I'll wrangle the civilian governments. We'll have to comb through the treaty."
I immediately nodded in affirmation and then took off down the hallway. Again, there was more work to do.