Weekly Drabble #326: Sneak Peek of THS Ch. 40 (Patreon)

This week's sole prompt was from EBB with 'clear the way', which led me to thinking about some history in the Angelverse, and led to this excerpt, which may or may not end up in the finished chapter.

Enjoy!

~

If you asked Lucille Kallimakos who the Gethemeki and Azurgeir were, she would have have no answer. Nor would any polity, nation or race currently alive, save for the crypt minds within the Nibiru system.

Twenty-five thousand years ago, there was a species known as the Gethemeki. Though their countenance would have reduced any human who looked upon them to horrified screams, they were largely inoffensive as a people. They were born  within a trinary star system in which none of the three stars were brown dwarves, more than thirty planets locked into a delicate and carefully choreographed, yet inherently unstable, dance between the three roaring furnaces at their system’s heart and the three dozen worlds that orbited them.

When they emerged from their home system, it was as cautious explorers, for as they had grown they had borne witness to the Long Night of a Thousand Knives, an era upon which relativistic kill vehicles soared between the stars, towards and between other inhabited lights as bringers of extinction, revenge or pre-emptive attacks upon known murderers. This was much to the amusement of the Naiads of that era, who would find it entertaining to nudge these world-killers off-course at the last possible second, befouling the careful targeting calculations of those who’d launched them with the smallest of efforts and prolonging the conflicts by centuries as a result.

As the centuries of the Long Night finally faded and the heavens no longer burned with the after-images of wanton genocide, the Gethemeki emerged into the ashes of what was. They were the first species in the galaxy to survive the Great Filter of such an unstable star system before a planetary or stellar collision, ejection or other disruption snuffed out any chance of life. Some would say that their existence was a cosmic fluke, others that it was a miracle. Whatever it might have been, it gave them a particular insight into warp mechanics that other species lacked. With three main sequence stars and dozens of planets, the Gethemeki home system’s gravity well was the astrographic equivalent of a sand trap, requiring it to be well cleared before there could be any hope of safely creating a warp point.

It was by overcoming this hurdle that the Gethemeki developed the ability to warp from deeper in-system than any known polity or species before.

The Gethemeki never knew what to make of their portentous survival, but they eventually grew to become shepherds of sorts to the younger races of the age, revered for their wisdom, respected for their power and held in awe for the exuberance in which they still saw the universe despite how far they had come. It was this curiousity that would prove their downfall, when one of their explorers discovered something that should have been left to sleep.

The Azurgeir people lived and died twenty thousand light-years and two millennia away from the Gethemeki. Their existence was not one as honoured elders, but as gazelles upon the savannah. Somewhat akin to brittle stars in form, the Azurgeir had a proclivity for artisanry in all they did, incorporating an organic sense of style to many of their greatest works. The human concepts of Brutalist or modernist architecture would have been shocking and repellent to them. They were also some of the finest cyberneticists of their region; Azurgeir computers and implants became known for their efficiency and reliability.

Sadly, their natural aptitude for entwining style within substance and their engineering skills did little to spare them and over a period of twenty years, the Azurgeir were driven from their colonies and homeworld by the Ceci-Aan. In the following centuries, the Azurgeir fared little better as a migrant fleet, frequently preyed upon by others who came to loot their technology, the dwindling remains of their culture or even harvest their bodies – Azurgeir hormones, when treated with the right combination of chemicals, created a sense of well-being that many Jhellnar found irresistible and synthetic blends just didn’t have the same sensation.

Hunted relentlessly for their technology, their remaining wealth and even their own flesh, the Azurgeir found themselves suffering the most whenever they tried to fight back, and so their doctrines began to emphasize flight over fight. Their vessels became known for their speed at sublight and within shiftspace. Likewise, their shift systems spooled up after a warp almost twice as fast as anyone else’s, allowing them to quickly evade pursuit. Another necessary advancement was that Azurgeir shift systems did not destabilize as much or as often as those of other species when exposed to non-gravitic variables such as radiation, heat, high energy or other elements associated with weapons fire, allowing Azurgeir vessels to form warp points even while under heavy assault.

The unending predation of their people wore the Azurgeir down and when they discovered a cache of advanced technology that might, at last, allow them to stop fearing every sensor contact they saw, they embraced it. Disseminating it across their fleets, the harried species never knew until it was too late what the true cost of that power was.

The Gethemeki and Azurgeir had, like so many other species across the galaxy, been unique. Had they survived beyond their eras, they might have become angels of a sort, guiding the younger races with hard-earned lessons of the past, imbuing them with respect and wonder for the galaxy around them, acting as a check upon the dangers that grew with these younger species. So much could have been possible for the Gethemeki and Azurgeir alike...

...but in the end, they were just parts.