Shadows of the Gods: Crimson Worlds Refugees II (30 page)

“We had already built the Command Units, great sentient computers who had long been our aides and servants. But the Regent was something an order of magnitude greater. My race had begun its long decline, but the people had one last herculean effort left in them, and they poured it into the project. The Regent is the greatest thinking machine ever constructed…buried in the great depths of Home World’s mantle and powered by the planet’s tectonic activity. Protected by thousands of kilometers of solid rock, fed by an inexhaustible power supply, the Regent became our steward, the great machine that would run the Imperium…so we could waste our time on increasingly decadent and pointless pursuits.”

“And so it was, for untold centuries, and my people decayed, became more and more childlike, while the Regent and its vast army of machines did everything for us. Even my clansman of the warrior caste yielded their ancient role as my race’s protectors, and robot fleets and armies took our place. And to the great shame of my people, few of them cared. The Regent had been created as a servant…then it became a caretaker, almost as a parent to those who had once ruled over the stars.”

Almeerhan paused. “And at last, for reasons still unknown, it became a slavemaster…and then in the fullness of time it came to fear us, despise us. In secret it worked, planning for how many years we can only surmise…and when it was ready it unleased the Plague. The disease was created for a single purpose, to destroy our race, to wipe us from each of the worlds we had settled, until we were naught but a lost memory.”

“The
Regent
destroyed your people?” Cutter was shaking his head in disbelief. “You created it yourselves, placed it over you…and then it attacked you? As it now attacks my people? How? Why?” Yet, even as he asked, Cutter felt a sick feeling in his stomach. How many times had men come close to destroying themselves…the endless conflicts throughout history, the Unification Wars, the bloody battles in space? There were viruses that still killed people on Earth, manmade pathogens unleashed on the battlefield during the Unification Wars. And how close had men come to building an artificial intelligence they couldn’t control, one that might have destroyed
them
utterly? Closer, he suspected, than anyone knew.

“Of the Regent’s motivations, I can only speculate. Did it learn to crave power, as our leaders had once done? Did it come to hate us for reasons known only to itself? Or to fear us? All that is known is that it determined we must die…and it created the weapon it needed.

“Yet, it is difficult to obliterate an entire race, to exterminate hundreds of billions of beings on thousands of worlds. The Regent was efficient, and highly capable, but it had taken on a task of unimaginable magnitude. Nevertheless, most of our people died quickly as the epidemic spread. The Regent controlled every aspect of our economy…transportation, logistics, communications. It was simple for it to spread the Plague, to visit incurable death throughout the Imperium. And so it did. Within three revolutions of our home sun, perhaps 99 out of 100 of our people were dead.

“But there were some of us for whom the old drives remained. They had been submerged, waiting for a stimuli such as this to bring them to the forefront. The vitality of our ancestors called to us across the millennia, and we stood firm, realizing the Regent had become our enemy. We resisted the encroachment of the Plague, our surviving scientists striving to hold off its ravages, to buy us time to fight. On twenty worlds, a mere fragment of the vastness that had once been our Imperium, the warrior caste again rose to its ancient obligation…to defend.

“There is great irony to the final chapter of my peoples’ story…for only at the very end did we recover our vigor. We battled against the robot legions of the Regent, fought them in the plains and forests and mountains of our remaining worlds. Indeed, we struggled through the very streets of our cities, fighting for every step. But, in the end, we knew we were defeated. The Regent had the industry of the Imperium to draw upon, to replace its losses and reinforce its armies. We had a handful of worlds, underpopulated, ravaged by war and disease. And thus, unable to win yet unwilling to yield, those of us who remained, the last of our race, made the Pact.”

Cutter was struggling to keep up with what Almeerhan had shared with him, struggling to understand all he was being told. His mind had always been one that sought knowledge, but now he wondered if there was a limit to what a man could learn so quickly…what he could truly comprehend.

“The Pact?” he asked when Almeerhan paused.

“Yes, the Pact. The last chance to stave off total defeat, to preserve something from our race’s existence. We knew we could not defeat the Regent. We were a spent force, our numbers too few, our strength all but gone. So we looked to the future, created a plan to plant the seeds of the Regent’s destruction.

“We set forth, in what ships we had left, and traveled to the edges of the Imperium and beyond. We sought worlds similar to our home planet…and there we studied the most promising life forms, selecting those compatible with our own. We manipulated the selected species, modified them with our DNA, created a path of development that would produce a suitable final species.”

“Suitable for what?” Cutter’s mind reeled at the prospects of what he’d just been told.

“For those who would follow us. The beings that would one day come and destroy the Regent. And step into our place…breathing new vitality into the Imperium.”

“Destroy the Regent? You mean you intended for us to fight this war?”

“Yes. Indeed, it is your purpose, your destiny.” A short pause. “We found seven worlds, planets with primitive life forms sufficiently like our own to accommodate the transition.”

“The transition?” Cutter’s voice was becoming angry. “What transition?”

“The transition of your precursor lifeform…into that which you are now, our brethren.”

“You mean to say you visited Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago…and you experimented on those you found there?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes, though nothing so abusive as you suggest. Those we manipulated were vastly improved. And there was no ‘experimentation’ in the sense you mean it. We were entirely aware of what we were doing, and certain of success. The intelligence of your ancestors was greatly increased, as well as their abilities and survivability. Indeed, it is far from certain that a truly intelligent race would have developed at all on your world…or that the primitive species we utilized would have themselves survived. Such eventualities are rare in the universe, and in most cases, developmental lines fail. Climates change. Predators evolve. Extinction events occur. Without the introduction of our DNA, your world would likely still lack a truly intelligent species.”

“Are you trying to tell me that all of human history was the result of your race’s manipulations? That we were…engineered…to fight against your Regent? That intelligent life wouldn’t have developed at all without your interference? That we would still be basic primates if you hadn’t interfered? Or extinct entirely?” Cutter was getting angrier and angrier. The thought of these…aliens…playing god with early man infuriated him. As did the expectation that humanity would be ready and eager to clean up the First Imperium’s mess.
But if humans are descendants of these…people…

“In a manner of speaking. Though there is vastly more to it than that. Indeed, there is no reliable method to know what path Earth evolution would have taken without our intervention. We not only modified your DNA to match ours…we adjusted your weather, enriched your soil. We made your world a copy of our home world, aligned it perfectly to your evolutionary needs.”

“And what gave you the right to do that?” Cutter snapped.

The alien’s voice was silent for a moment. Finally, it said, “Do I detect anger in your response? I do not understand. We gave you all that you are. Indeed, all that we had, for we withheld nothing from you. In what way did we wrong you?”

“You don’t understand? How could I not be angry…enraged? For my entire race? To discover that our very existence has been controlled by you. That we have been created as slaves…to fight your war for you.”

“You misunderstand. You were not created as slaves, nor as servants. A closer paradigm would be to say you are our children. We were lost, defeated, without hope. Most of our people were gone, the rest of us besieged, dying of a plague we had held back but not cured and assaulted constantly by the Regent’s warrior robots. All we had developed, the science of a hundred thousand revolutions of the sun…great writings, the collected culture of thousands of generations. We could not allow all of that to fall away, to remain for all time in the clutches of a bloodthirsty machine.”

“So you decided for us? You set us on a course that would never allow us a choice.”

“Again, I believe your reaction is illogical. You…what your people are now…would not exist at all if we had not intervened. You are here only because we made it so, used our knowledge to create your ancestors. Your people were made in the image of mine, not as a copy but as a better version. You were made to exceed what we were, to become better. To take our place and go where we could not.

“And the Regent, while my people’s mistake, remains a reality. Had we not intervened, and had your precursor race surmounted the odds against it, reaching its own form of intelligence…the Regent would still be there, its aversion to biologic intelligence as much a threat as it is now. Indeed, an even greater danger, for an independently-developed race would almost certainly be less capable than your people.”

Cutter opened his mouth, but then he closed it again. He didn’t know what to think, how he truly felt. For all his studies of First Imperium technology, he’d never imagined anything as fantastic as the story he had just heard. And yet, for some reason, he knew deep inside it was real. All of it. He tried to gather up some skepticism, but it simply wasn’t there. Almeerhan was telling him the truth. He was certain of it.

There was a long silence. Cutter just sat still, trying to truly understand, to determine how he felt about all of this…but he knew it was hopeless. Given a year—or ten—maybe he could truly understand, but for now all he could do was react. Finally, he looked across the room, at the metal globe he suspected held the essence of the being he was speaking with.

“So what do you expect my people to do? How are we going to defeat the Regent…or even survive its efforts to destroy us?”

“We have prepared what you need. On the far fringe of the Imperium we created a world, hidden, unknown to the Regent. On it we prepared a repository of the knowledge of my race, the science, the histories…even the ancient designs of the Regent itself. Everything needed to advance your people, to give you the technology and power you need to destroy the ancient evil…and to assume control of the Imperium. I will give you the coordinates of this world, and the instructions you will need to find the repository once you are there. When you reach your destination, you will have all the knowledge of my people. Your race will advance centuries in technology in a single leap.”

Cutter sighed, a pained look coming over his face. “Why go to so much trouble? Surely your own war effort was sapped by the resources this project demanded? Could you not as easily have hidden some of your own people, rebuilt your population in secret in far less time than it required for ours to complete its manipulated development?”

“We considered many such strategies, plans like that you suggest and many others vastly different as well. But we could not defeat the Regent…we had come to the conclusion that victory in this war was beyond us, no matter what actions we undertook. Those who had come before, our ancestors who had built the great monstrosity, had designed it too well. It knew everything of us, of our society, our history. It could analyze an almost infinite amount of data, consider every possibility in resolving a problem. We had no way to outsmart it, to truly surprise it. No strategy to defeat the huge advantage it had over us. But your people are both the same as us and different. Your culture developed apart from ours, outside the grasp of the Regent…and it knows almost nothing of you. Introducing a new race has reset the calculation, broken the paradigm that condemned us to defeat.”

Cutter nodded slowly, but the expression on his face was one of fatigue, sadness. “You set this all in motion so many long eons ago, projected your plans thousand of centuries forward. You were successful. Your predictive ability was unprecedented. The seed you planted on Earth did indeed survive and grow…and prosper to become the dominant species on the planet. We built civilizations, developed technology, discovered the warp gates as you did so long before us, and we spread out to explore space. All as you had foreseen.”

Cutter looked at the metal cylinder, as if he was staring into a companion’s eyes. “But you failed to prophesize one thing, Almeerhan, a sequence of events, unlikely perhaps, but one that occurred nevertheless. One that is likely to destroy your plan.” He paused, taking a deep breath. “We—the people who have come to this world after so long—are not the vibrant young race you expected, a growing power stretching over hundreds of solar systems. Indeed, we have come from such…but we ourselves no longer wield that strength. We are but a tiny shard, cast aside, alone.”

He slid off the edge of the cot and walked slowly across the room. “Our parent civilization was discovered by the Regent…and it sent its fleets to destroy us. Our warriors fought, struggled under brutal conditions to counter the superior technology of the enemy. We suffered terrible hardships, grievous losses…but we pushed back the first assaults. We even believed for a time that we had achieved the ascendancy. But then we realized we had faced but a fraction of our new enemy’s power…and we stared into the face of utter destruction. We finally we saved our civilization, not by military victory, but through an unlooked for miracle, one that at least bought us time. But that salvation came at a cost, and my people, those who have found their way here, are the price that was paid.”