The Nature of Expansion

A different meeting

There were two known instances of a predatory species achieving sentience in the galaxy.

The Arxur were the first to be discovered, and, as an anomaly, sparked the Federation's curiosity. By previous hypotheses on intelligence, their existence was impossible. Conventional wisdom stated that cooperation led to higher thinking, which in turn, led to the formation of technological societies. A predator's natural instinct for aggression should have limited their evolution.

But it turned out that there was another motivator for technological progress; war. The Arxur derived pleasure from killing each other, and in doing so, managed to claw their way to an industrial stage. Their warfare was so deadly that we feared they would become extinct before we could study them.

The Federation saw their cruelty, but in our naivety, we thought we could change them. If we uplifted them, there would be no logical reason for their destructive ways to persist. Thus, we made our worst mistake: we decided to intervene.

It was out of our kindness that we unleashed the galaxy's worst monsters. We gave genocidal maniacs the means to escape their planet, and all but invited them to our doorstep. The Federation was an easy target to them, and they set out to claim our territories for themselves. They torched worlds, enslaved millions, and bred our children as delicacies. Our pleas for mercy fell on deaf ears; predators had no sense of compassion to appeal to, after all.

The Federation rallied together to fend them off and began the ceaseless war for our survival. From that point onward, it was agreed that no predatory species could be allowed to reach the stars. Their kind were too great of a threat to the civilized universe.

Little known to the public, scientists discovered a second predatory sapient century ago. Much like the Arxur, they slaughtered and committed atrocities against their own; it was visible from their broadcasts. The Federation voted to exterminate them, before it was too late.

But while we spent decades drafting termination plans, hundreds of nuclear explosions were detected across the planet. Our strategists concluded, with a grim sense of relief, that they had wiped themselves out. The species was forgotten, mentioned only as an asterisk to the Arxur's unique predator status.

Yet now, my advisors were digging for every record of these predators off the internet. There was a gargantuan ship on the outer reaches of our atmosphere, its shadow covering our city in darkness like that of an eclipse. We'd barely had time to track its subspace trail back to earth and initiate an evacuation when a hail came.

"Governor Tarva" My military advisor Kam, was growing more impatient by the minute. It was obvious that he wanted to be cleared for action. "Please, I beg you we must try to shoot them down."

"Are you certain we cannot evacuate the planet?" I asked, aware of the hail still echoing throughout my office.

Kam sighed. "You know the answer ma'am, they were within our outer atmosphere by the time we detected them. It's already too late."

I grimaced, every one of our FTL relays was trying to broadcast a planetary distress signal from the moment we identified the ship as human. But they couldn't, something about the human ship had halted and redirected our relays back to us. And even if the relays could make it past, it'd take Federation allies hours to reach us. By the time they arrived our world would be reduced to rubble, but from the look of their ship, our planet itself might be reduced to nothing. And from the difficulty we had with tracking their subspace trail, our destruction would be left unknown.

Was there any way to stop the coming onslaught? Was enslavement preferable to death? It was doubtful, but I didn't see another way to bargain for my race's survival. There was nothing else to be done.