Fear, that would be the expected response to the situation.
Shock, panic, shouting, prayers. Sometimes screaming. When people appear in a room that did not exist a heartbeat before, that is what most visitors bring with them. Noise. Loss of control.
I did none of that.
I felt the shift. A pressure behind the eyes, a distortion in the inner ear, the faint nausea that accompanies sudden displacement. Then gravity reasserted itself, and I was standing on a polished floor beneath lighting that did not belong to my world. I didn't panic.
I breathed. Slow. Measured.
My first thought was not Where am I? It was. So they finally came.
Around me, others were arriving. Faces I knew well and a few I only knew by reputation. Three from the northern mountains. Three from the coast. Three from the desert clans. And three of us from the breeding enclaves. The three who could no longer bear children, who no longer had any function except to run the enclaves.
Twelve in total.
The others reacted exactly as expected. They were young and still held onto the ways of their faction.
The mountain delegates scanned the room with rapid eye movements, already mapping lines of fire and angles of escape. Beta-2 cognition always does that. Threat assessment before curiosity. Survival of command structures demands it.
The coastal representatives focused on the technology. Surfaces, materials, interfaces. Gamma-5s cannot help themselves. Their nervous systems crave complexity the way others crave warmth.
The desert leaders tested restraint points and footing. Alpha-7s read environments through strength and resistance. If something cannot be broken, it must be understood differently.
And us. We had long abandoned the ways of our factions; our instinct was to protect the Delta-9s as a whole. Insight that only came with age.
We watched the people.
I met the eyes of the woman who had brought us here. Tanya. Shipwright. Bonded. The name had circulated through our internal channels the moment she entered orbit. We had been listening long before she spoke to any of the factions. We had been warned of her arrival by a stranger.
She looked younger than I expected. Tired in the way of people who refuse to stop moving even when rest would be safer.
She was not a conqueror. That much was clear.
That was both reassuring and deeply dangerous. She would not get the respect she needed if she wasn't willing to do what needed to be done.
I stepped forward before the others could escalate.
"You are the interstellar representative," I said. "We have been monitoring your communications."
Her shoulders tightened. Not fear. Responsibility.
"Then you understand why I brought you here."
I did. Better than she knew.
"You brought us here because your diplomatic approach failed, and you are desperate enough to try coercion."
The word made the mountain delegate bristle. The coastal one smiled thinly. The desert leader grunted in approval.
Tanya did not deny it.
"We are not ignorant of galactic politics," I continued. "The breeding castes maintain their own knowledge of what happened before we were left here."
That earned me several sharp looks.
Secrets are currency on a dying world. We have survived by spending them carefully.
When Tanya finally cut through their arguments, I saw the fracture in her resolve. She was not built for this kind of hatred. Engineers expect problems to yield if approached correctly. This one does not.
She asked what it would take to stop the war.
Justice. Reparations. Recognition.
I said the only honest answer.
Impossible.
War debt is not a metaphor. It is a ledger written in bodies and hunger and children raised on stories of theft and betrayal. Every faction believes forgiveness would invalidate the dead. To stop fighting would mean admitting that the sacrifices did not secure the future they were promised.
And so the war continues because stopping feels like betrayal.
When she asked if there was common ground, I told her about extinction.
Equality through annihilation.
That was when the room went quiet.
They all knew it already. Every one of them. We track the atmospheric decay. The water tables. The soil toxicity. The reproductive viability curves. Our numbers do not lie.
The planet will kill us whether we stop fighting or not.
The war just lets us choose the order.
Afterward, they were returned.
The extraction had been clean. No injuries. No deaths. Tanya kept her word.
That matters.
Back on the surface, the enclaves reacted predictably. Increased security. Emergency councils. Accusations of betrayal. The mountain leadership accused us of collusion. The coast accused us of information asymmetry. The desert accused us of cowardice.
None of that was new.
What was new was the silence that followed.
For the first time in generations, all three factions paused their offensive planning for nearly six hours. Six hours without artillery repositioning. Without strike calculations. Without border probing.
Six hours of uncertainty.
That is more valuable than any weapon.
I convened the enclave council as soon as I returned. We do not have a single meeting place. That would make us too easy to control. Instead, we meet through specially planned virtual spaces. Always changing, always adapting.
"They will kill each other," said one of the elders. "They always do."
"Yes," I replied. "But not yet."
"They will blame us."
"They already do."
"They will try to seize our facilities."
"They always try."
One of the younger delegates spoke then. Newly elevated. Still carrying the optimism that comes from not having buried children.
"She offers evacuation."
I nodded.
"She offers escape," I corrected. "Evacuation implies rescue. This is relocation with conditions."
"And if we accept?"
"Then the others will accelerate the war to prevent us from leaving."
"And if we do not?"
"Then we die here."
The room absorbed that in silence.
I did not soften it. Soft truths kill more people than hard ones.
We reviewed the data she had not shown the others. Off-world manufacturing capacity. Forge systems. Genetic compatibility matrices. Projected roles she believed we would fill.
She needs us.
That is the critical point.
Not as breeders. Not as symbols. As stabilisers.
We are the only group that interfaces with all three factions without immediate violence. We are the only ones whose children are born into every settlement. The only ones whose absence would be catastrophic rather than merely painful.
That gives us leverage.
But leverage is useless if you cannot survive its use.
One of the elders asked the question none of the others wanted to voice.
"Can we trust her?"
Trust is a luxury of stable societies. We operate on probabilities.
"She did not lie," I said. "She did not force compliance beyond temporary displacement. She did not threaten annihilation. And she argued with her own Gardener. They would not have allowed us to leave."
That last point mattered.
We have studied the Gardeners. Not directly, but through pattern analysis. Their bonded are tools, not partners. We are the result of a gardener's curiosity. Tanya treats hers as neither.
"She will not sacrifice us lightly," I continued. "But she will sacrifice us if she believes the alternative is worse."
Several heads nodded.
That was acceptable.
I surprised them with my answer about demands.
"We demand nothing yet."
Silence.
"Why?"
"Because she is not ready to hear demands. She is still deciding whether she is allowed to make them."
I activated the environmental projections. The collapse curves. The fertility decline. The extinction horizon.
"This planet has less than fifty years," I said. "But the war will end us in two. Perhaps three."
I let the silence stretch until the truth settled.
"But we can fracture the cycle."
They looked at me then. Really looked.
"We do not leave," I said. "Not yet. We prepare to leave. But first, we remove ourselves as leverage."
"The war persists because every faction believes controlling us guarantees survival. We change that."
"How?"
"We decouple reproduction from territory."
That got their attention.
"We accept the off-world medical support. Artificial gestation. Genetic vaulting. External population seeding."
Gasps. Objections. Fear.
"You would make us irrelevant."
"I would make us untouchable."
I let the implications unfold.
No breeding centers to raid. No forced alliances. No hostage populations. No reason to fight over who controls us.
The war would not stop immediately.
But it would lose its justification.
Someone asked the question I had been waiting for.
"And what do we give her?"
I smiled, small and precise.
"Truth."
"About what?"
"About the experiment. About why it failed. About what the designers never understood."
I looked at the projection of the dying planet.
"They engineered function but ignored meaning. They optimised bodies and forgot stories. They assumed cooperation would emerge from compatibility."
I met their eyes.
"Tell her that survival requires something her systems cannot fabricate."
"What?"
"Choice."
Outside, artillery began to move again. The war would resume soon.
But for six hours, it had paused.
That was proof enough.
If Tanya was willing to listen, truly listen, then perhaps extinction was not the only equality left to us.
If not, then we would die knowing we had tried something other than killing each other.
On this world, that alone would be a revolution.