Chapter [CLASSIFIED] - Councils End (1/2)

Ru'udamo'o was a former Executor covert action specialist. He was a shadow in the system, the suggestion of a shadow, a hint of an existence and he was fine with that. He had served the Unified Civilized Council's peoples for three thousand years. When the C3 and it's collateral damage started he had sought out the forbidden to consult. The Herd Stallion. The Herd Matron. He did not fear their power, he sought their wisdom to understand where they intended on guiding the Great Herd.

He, more than anyone, understood that the Civilized Council was nothing more than a brackish swamp slowly drying away to salt plains. That in a hundred million years his people had managed to do little more than destroy star systems to feed an overwhelming appetite they didn't even understand.

He had watched the C3 War with interest. For the first time in the Council's history they weren't facing off against a species that had barely developed space travel and stellar class combat weapons with only a few systems for resources and manufacturing. Every scrap of information he could gather on the Confederacy pointed to thousands of systems, multiple species, heavy industrial capacity and capability, massive shipyards, research programs, and the infrastructure to prosecute interstellar wars.

While his peers and superiors (or those who saw themselves as his superior) just hand-waved away the eight thousand years of interstellar travel for the lemurs, Ru'udamo'o examined it closely.

It was doing a deep data dive on the Confederacy that he discovered a simple fact that the lemurs and their allies ignored.

The longest period of peace the Confederacy had enjoyed was an astounding 63 days.

The Confederacy was made up of aligned systems, not a single system under the rulership of the Senate.

Ru'udamo'o had found out that there were nearly 58 human stellar organizations withing the Confederacy. The Mantids had three. The Treana'ad only one. The Rigellian Suarian Compact covered over a dozen species, many with their own stellar governments owning multiple stellar systems.

Even during the C3 War, the Confederacy was actively fighting in their own territory against 'Rogue Nation States” of various species.

He also discovered some very interesting information.

The Mar-gite War was followed by the Mithril Nebula Conflict which was followed by the Clownface Nebula Conflict. The Clownface Nebula Conflict was a misleading name, as the Confederacy actually fought a seven front war, against multiple breakaway states, the Clownface Nebula Systems acting as the primary belligerent.

Ru'udamo'o estimated that the lemurs had forgotten more about warfare than the Lanaktallan had ever learned.

He also estimated that 70-85% of the Confederate Armed Services had more than five years of combat experience. Roughly 45% of the Confederate Armed Services had more than a century of combat under their belts in everything from planetary assaults to bitter urban warfare to intrasystem ship to ship combat.

Lemur and Confederate military equipment had a shelf-life of roughly 10-25 years before refinement, upgrading, and replacement. The idea of ”Service Life Extension Programs” was a novel idea and the fact it allowed them to modularly upgrade war fighting equipment was another tic in the boxes. The weapons that lasted longer than a few hundred years relatively unchanged were famous and considered the backbone of whatever section they were in.

Additionally, the lemurs had differing theories of warfare, largely based on ”Generation” of warfare.

They also had nearly two dozens types of warfare, from 'surgical covert action' (which he appreciated deeply) to 'Total War', which was what the Confederacy had pushed forward against the Council once word had gotten out about the attacks on the Harmonous Cluster and what Ru'udamo'o considered atrocities had been revealed.

Examining the historical documents, biographies, even the fiction, of the Confederate Covert Action made Ru'udamo'o nod along. Their theorems and practical knowledge were far beyond what a youthful organization such as the Confederacy should be capable of.

He then looked at the lemurs allies. He could tell, even by their social media and entertainment media, that the lemurs had been just as influenced by their allies as their allies had been by them.

No self-respecting Lanaktallan would have allowed neo-sapients to influence them.

The juggernaut of Confederate culture, which was already used to multiple alien viewpoints, would crush the non-existent Council culture. This, Ru'udamo'o would have been willing to bet, to use a Terran term, his left nut on.

He had, out of duty and loyalty, attempted to make his fellow Executor Council Agents understand what he was seeing.

His estimations fell of deaf ears.

When the gold mantid Dreams of Something More had landed and demanded the unilateral and unconditional surrender of the Council, Ru'udamo'o had nodded sagely.

While his peers rubbed their hands and estimated it would take no longer than two hundred years to suborn the Confederacy and restore Lanaktallan to dominance, Ru'udamo'o had known better.

While carrying out important missions, Ru'udamo'o had watched his fellow Lanaktallan. How they had at first resisted and then gleefully participated in Confederate culture.

Where speech on GalNet had been heavily censored, any being could say anything to another being provided it wasn't an actionable threat. Feelings didn't matter. Rank didn't matter. Species didn't matter. Emotional impact was often the desired result of postings on GalNet.

Ru'udamo'o had watched a 'flame war' with interest. Despite the tens of thousands of reports on posts for ”deliberate emotional damage” nothing was done beyond ”Stop crying” by the moderators with a second warning being the offended being banned from the thread, subforum, forum, or VR space.

There were 'safe' areas, where speech and images and VR interactions were carefully monitored.

Ru'udamo'o's peers had stuffily stated that most sentient beings would gravitate toward the more monitored areas and the 'free for all zones' would eventually go away within weeks.

Instead, Ru'udamo'o had seen elderly and refined Matrons throw out slurs at other Matrons over the exact amount of fructose in a dessert. Insults and slurs that would have resulted in prison times or even rehabilitation prior to the Council's surrender.

While other Executors viewed what went on in the depths of GalNet to be of no concern to the 'real world' as they put it, Ru'udamo'o believed otherwise.

The other Executors as well as the Mental Hygiene Specialists were all confused over how so many Lanaktallan took to the 'video games', the more complicated and micromanaging and expansive, the better.

Ru'udamo'o had already discovered the definition of what those Lanaktallan, many of whom had risen to Great Most High or better, seemed to enjoy so much about those video games.

Grinding. The idea of doing the same thing over and over until they got it perfect or to 'farm' a repeatable task to stack up the benefits.

Ru'udamo'o understood what 'grinding' satiated in the Lanaktallan soul.

The need to show dominance over other Lanaktallan without exposing oneself to real world risk.

Ru'udamo'o knew that the things he had done as the treaties were being signed, as each system governor surrendered to Dreams of Something More and the government she represented, would eventually be discovered and many would react with horror.

Some would view what he did as 'covering up war crimes' but that was not how he saw it.

It would take years, decades, centuries to untangle everything he had done.

Executing scientists and government officials who had authorized the experiments. Wiping the data after securing a copy and ensuring a copy of what had been done was delivered to Dreams as well as to the ancient AI Deus. Destroying lab facilities.

He wasn't covering up anything.

Ru'udamo'o just believed that if, on the eve of the surrender, if some blindly self-righteous Most High proudly proclaimed what had been done during the war, it would make it that much harder for peace between the Lanaktallan and all they had abused would be that much harder.

Personally, Ru'udamo'o knew it was only the lessons of the Confederacy and the Mad Lemurs of Terra that made such sentients as the Telkan fight so hard to protect the Lanaktallan, the very people that had brutalized theirs.

Ru'udamo'o believed that the Lanaktallan were on the cusp of a new golden age. An age of expansion, of pulling his people back from being mindless drug-stunned zombies stumbling through life contributing nothing and only consuming. An age of greatness, striding forward into the future next to the Lemurs and their allies.

While other Lanaktallan believed the Mad Lemurs of Terra were now largely extinct, Ru'udamo'o believed no such thing.

Enough of the Mad Lemurs of Terra still survived on their ”LARP Worlds” and the ”Locusts” and the ”Martial Orders” as well as ”The Last Fleet” and a handful of other worlds.

An extinct race did not number forty million across multiple worlds.

That and Deus had told Ru'udamo'o more than once, during their long talks, that it wasn't the first time the Mad Lemurs of Terra had been nearly obliterated.

Ru'udamo'o knew that the majority of intelligent species would have given up after such a mass die off. That the huge amount of deaths would have left the Lemurs a depressed, despondent race that would have just surrendered to entropy.

Deus had told Ru'udamo'o that such a setback, such a terrible depopulation of what was nearly a xenocide, would do nothing more than galvanize the remainder.

Where others would close their eyes and surrender to inevitability, surrender to entropy, allowing themselves to drift away on a haze of neurochemicals, the Mad Lemurs of Terra would instead scream and pound against the gates.

The ancient AI Deus, programmed before the Great Glassing during the height of the Age of Paranoia, had simply told Ru'udamo'o that the Terrans would be back. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week or even next year or decade.

But they would be back.

Which was why Ru'udamo'o looked at his work as so vitally important.

The stains he was cleaning up, those terrible blots upon the Council and all of the species who were part of it, could not be allowed to be unpunished. He was cleaning them, he wanted them to take decades or centuries to be fully exposed to the general public, but he did not want the Lanaktallan permanently stained by them.

Oh, the ones who had committed or authorized them deserved what they got at Ru'udamo'o's hands as far as he was concerned.

But the Matron sitting eating ice cream with a Telkan Matron and a Hamaroosa Matron did not deserve to have her hide permanently blotted by what amoral scientists had performed without her knowledge or consent.

We are not at war with your people, we are at war with your government and those who enable it, he heard a lemur's voice say in his memories.

What had convinced Ru'udamo'o about the difference was simple.

The Lanaktallan, and the Council, said: Surrender and be destroyed.

The Lemurs, and the Confederacy, said: Surrender OR be destroyed.

One word.

To Ru'udamo'o, that summed up the difference between the Council and the Confederacy.

Freedom of choice.

His fellow Executors viewed the Confederacy's Freedom of Self-Determination, one of their basic rights, as something terrifying, something that should be kept out of the hands of the populace, and something that would destroy everything that everyone had worked so hard for.

To Ru'udamo'o, his fellow former Executors complaining that the Right of Self-Determination would destroy everything while they sat, unemployed and outcast, in the ruins of the Unified Council, was a thing of comedy.

Ru'udamo'o smiled to himself as the Telkan Matron talked about how her son had lost his life savings gambling on the interstellar stock market but her daughter had reversed the family's fortunes by starring in a GalTube VR mini-series where she played Brentili'ik, the System Director of the Telkan system.

The other two matrons nodded regally as the Telkan Matron stated that her son had stated that it was gratifying even to lose, even to fail, as long as he had been the one to try and he failed due to his own decisions.

Nobody really noticed the small group that came in and was seated at Ru'udamo'o's table.

The gold mantid nervously cleaned her antenna, glancing at the black and the green ones with her.