Dark Fate, Chapter 181 (Patreon)

Chapter 181 – Musings

(Bridge, Huntship Brethak Claw)

Hasluh the Shadowstalker watched as the small collection of ships stitched out of the system, in one of the gravity shadows of the gas giant that the Humans called Jupiter. He had read what he could about the system, from the Human data networks. The planet’s name was the name of one of the gods of a people long dead, but who had conquered much of the world in their time. All the planets, save for Earth, were named so.

This wasn’t terribly uncommon for the home system of a species. Every species with enough intelligence looked up, and wondered what the lights moving in the sky were. And every species had gods. It was only natural that some would connect the two.

Of course, most species that Hasluh knew of, either through hunting them, or from his reading, only had one set of gods. At the most, they had two rival pantheons that existed until one absorbed the other, or one was crushed and forgotten. The System meant that gods were able to interact with their followers, after all, so the belief that gave them form and granted them power was something that they guarded.

This system, however, had been cut off from the System for longer than the humans had been a species. A comet or similar had struck the planet, knocking the connection to the System offline, and the humans grew up without it. This meant that the System didn’t offer them a common language, and their gods could not interact with their followers. Which led to an insane number of both developing.

He didn’t know where those ships were going, but, given the information he’d traded for with the Kingdom of Ceres, he had to believe that they were set upon raiding the Incux. The big ship in the middle of the four smaller ships that were clear siblings to the one that had decimated their hunt the last time they’d been here was clearly what the humans called a ‘carrier’. A ship designed not for hunting, but for carrying hunters to their target, allowing small craft to extend their reach, and project power further than they otherwise could.

It was not an approach he would have considered, before meeting the Humans. Oh, the idea of having small craft or fighters to defend a system was well established with the Ouran. After all, a system was a vast expanse, so it took many eyes to properly watch it. Having smaller ships that were nimbler, and could respond to situations as needed made sense. The part the Ouran had not thought of, before, was adding those light craft to a fleet designed to spend long periods of time away from port.

Ouran hunting doctrine focused around single ships like his Brethak Claw, or hunting packs of corvettes. Fleets were brought together for large hunts, or the sacking of entire worlds. Ships would fight ships, and the hunters would fight hunters on the ground. That was always how they had done things.

But it was only a foolish hunter who believed he had nothing more to learn. And foolish hunters were quickly turned into dead hunters. The Iscand Clan would have to learn these new tricks, and find ways to incorporate them into existing hunting tactics.

Already, he could see potential problems that would have to be addressed. The small craft used for system defense needed workers on the ground to maintain them. A carrier would need to carry not just the pilots and small craft, but the ground crews as well. Then there was the fuel and munitions for the craft, and the food and other supplies needed for all those people. That meant less space for weapons, or for whatever plunder the hunters might bring back.

This was not a problem for the humans, because they were warriors, not hunters. They fought to kill the enemy and protect their territory, not to bring plunder home with them. For the Ouran, however, hunters were meant to hunt, and bring back the spoils of the hunt to their clan. A ship that could not bring back said spoils, and would depend on small craft and other ships simply to defend itself from hunters? That was not something that the Ouran mindset was ready for. Not as they currently were.

However, it was clear to him that the Ouran could not remain as they were. The humans, divided as they were, would not remain in that fractured state. He saw it clearly in their history. They fought each other because that was all they knew, but, given a threat from outside, enemies would stand shoulder to shoulder to face that greater threat, just like the Ouran. While he doubted their internal divisions would go away completely, just as the Clans did not all become one, they would eventually find some kind of greater framework to bind themselves together, to face the greater galaxy.

And then, they would begin expanding. They would not remain contained to a single system, that much was obvious. Which meant that the Ouran needed to prepare for the day when the human territory brushed against theirs.

An idea had taken root in his mind, ever since one of his subordinates reported on some of the things they’d found in the ‘entertainment’ libraries of the human datanet. Of course, this was because he’d tasked several subordinates to sift through the massive libraries, and see what could be learned. You could learn as much about a people by the entertainment they followed as by their histories, after all. The history told how a people had acted, but the entertainment told how that people thought, and was key to understanding them, and better making strategies to defeat them.

The idea that he now had was something that came from an entertainment series in what the humans called ‘science-fiction’. Even though humans were the only sapient beings on their planet, there were clearly signs that the wider galaxy had impacted their development in some way. Was it because of the timestrikes in the system? Or perhaps some kind of psychic leakage influencing them, despite the lack of the System? It was impossible to say, but the fact that they already had depictions in their media, be they science-fiction or fantasy, of different groups in the wider galaxy? And that they were fairly accurate, at least in the broad strokes? Well, that caused him to review some of the more popular works, and see if there was anything he could learn.

His decision proved correct. Not just the media review, but also his earlier suggestion to have the Humans be named a Peer species. It quickly became apparent that there were several distinct paths human literature went on, when they encountered alien life.

The first, and sadly most realistic, path was that of an invader using superior technology and control of the orbitals to take the planet, and enslave the populace. However, in those stories, the invaders never truly won, unless they glassed the planet and ensured the total eradication of the entire human species, along with anything they might have touched. Otherwise, they always rebelled, and often descended to depths of savagery that would make even the most hardened killer go into death-shock. And, eventually, the enemy would be broken, and flee.

Except that wasn’t the end of that path. For humans had concepts such as ‘vengeance’ and ‘spite’. That path always continued, until the power that invaded was broken completely. At that point, there was a minor fork in the paths. Sometimes, the humans continued with the extermination, and sometimes, they relented, and tried to be better. But, either way, the power that had wounded them was fundamentally destroyed.

This path wasn’t entirely vanity or self-embellishment by the humans, either. They had been isolated on their world by the lack of the System, and had warred almost constantly with each other, seemingly since the day one tribe became two in the furthest reaches of their prehistory. Not even humans could conquer humans, and have them stay conquered, unless they decided that life was better with the victor.

The second main path was what he thought of as the Empire path. Humans encountered aliens, hostile or not, and united against a common foe, out of fear or necessity. But, to stay united, they had to keep the foe as the great enemy. And so, they were the ones who conquered. They conquered, and kept conquering, because if they stopped the war machine, the entire thing came tumbling apart. And enslavement or extermination was all that awaited those who stood against the different Empires.

Again, this was something he saw mirrored in their own history. It was an effective means of control, so long as those in power could control the information. Up until the global data network called the ‘internet’ became realized, that was something governments could do, with different degrees of difficulty, as one could see from the standoff between two major powers called the ‘Cold War’. However, the internet made getting information from outside the government’s control possible, which was why the remaining major power’s ‘global war on terror’ had fizzled and died as people could not be convinced of the necessity of it, or suggested that fundamental policy changes would better solve the problem, rather than military intervention.

And yet, when dealing with an alien species, in far off systems, where information would have to be carried by ships, before it could be added to the internet? There would be far more chances for the government to control what people did and did not see or hear. Which meant that the kind of information control necessary for an Empire to conquer would be possible, especially if some event (real or imagined) were to incite the emotions of the people.

The third path, and the most insanely unrealistic one of all, was that of isolation. Of finding some way to cut off human space from outside influences, and forcing them to just leave humans alone. Even in the stories, this basically involved technology or magic that was so supremely powerful that it was essentially an ‘instant win’ button.

While it wasn’t impossible to shift people or even planets into different planes of existence, given the System’s power, that wasn’t something that someone could casually do. The idea of cutting off the System in their space, and returning to the world they had before was possible, but that would essentially amount to destroying their planet in order to save it. More importantly, that would involve humans giving up the power that the System offered them, and too many of them coveted power for that to ever be a realistic plan.

No, it was the fourth, and final path that he was thinking of. The path of alliances, or a ‘federation’, as one series in particular put it. This was the path that offered the best options for the Ouran people, and Clan Iscand in particular, which he would suggest to the Great Hunter upon his return.

That the Systems Commonwealth that the Kingdom of Ceres had already contacted was an example of this already gave him hope that the humans would move down this path. The important part was that the ‘federation’ in the stories he saw was made up of all peoples. The fact that the aliens all tended to look human, or mostly human, was easily attributable to the fact that there were limits to what human actors could easily portray, without spending far too much time and money on the problem. Without a System to aid them, the humans had simply been limited by the rules of existence as they knew them.

But the important part was how this federation was set up. Individual worlds were still under local control, with local customs backing them. There were some standards that worlds were supposed to meet, but, other than that, they were left to do what they wished. All while getting a larger force to defend the whole.

It wouldn’t be easy to convince the Great Hunter, or the other clans, of this. It wasn’t something that could be done quickly, or with too much haste. The whole thing had to be guided so that it seemed the natural course of events, without any manipulation. That was the only path he could see where the Ouran Huntworlds did not cease to be, should the humans ever seriously look their way, and not like what they see.