here with one thing I have been authorised to speak of.â
âOne thing,â Sandy repeated. âBetter than nothing, I suppose.â
Cai looked down in his cup. A handsome face, like all GIs were handsome. Wide features, firm. Young but not youthful. Perhaps natural mid-twenties . . . like herself. Sandy wondered how the Talee had chosen this form as their template. No shortage of human bodies floating in space during the war, well preserved. Exact features could be randomised, so he wouldnât look exactly like someone deceasedâand attract attention that wayâin human company.
âThe Talee,â said Cai, with calm deliberation, âare a post-extinction-level-event species. Self-inflicted.â
Boom. And just sat there and watched the humans all stare at each other. All except Ari, who muttered with possibly inappropriate triumph, âI fucking knew it!â And stared at Cai. âAbout three thousand years ago, right?â
Cai nodded.
âBigâ didnât describe the revelation. Humanity had waited centuries for more news on the Talee. Possibly someone already knew, possibly League already had figured it out, their space directly adjoining the Taleeâs as Federation space did not. But this was the first time the Talee, even through a synthetic representative, had chosen to reveal something this large about themselves. Talee motivations had eluded scientists, strategists, sentiencemodellers, and thinkers for generations. Now, finally, came the tantalising sense of long-awaited answers slipping into place.
âSo you understand why Cresta might cause us some alarm,â said Cai.
âHow much alarm?â Ibrahim asked.
Cai fixed him with a sombre, lidded stare. âIt changes things. Not dramatically, and not quickly, as nothing changes quickly with the Talee. But you might notice, I am here. Revealing things.â
Ibrahim nodded, as deadly serious and intent as Sandy had ever seen him. âPlease, continue.â
Cai took a breath. âIt took Talee civilisation perhaps a thousand years to recover. Most of the population was dead, on most worlds. On the homeworld, none remained. Only on colonies did some survive. It was clear to surviving generations what had happened; historical memory shifts and changes but cannot be entirely erased when the ruins of old civilisation remain all around. All of the new Talee race were all too clear on what had come before and been destroyed.
âEventually those survivors built up their civilisation enough to reclaim their technological heritage, and then to reclaim the stars. They rejoined with other surviving Talee civilisations, on other colonies, and those moments are amongst the most powerful and emotive of all Talee history. If you can imagine.â
âIâm not certain that we can,â Ibrahim said quietly.
âThe homeworld was resettled,â Cai continued. âBiological engineering began to try to put things back as they were, to restore ecosystems still unre-covered after all those centuries. That work continues today. Good progresshas been made, but there remains more to be done. Talee have a word for the extinction-level-event, perhaps the best and most obvious translation is âcatastrophe.â Catastrophe studies are prominent in Talee centres of learning. What you would call historians pore over it. Scientists examine it. Geologists look for traces in rocks, and biologists in water and plant matter. Conversation cannot avoid it. It is everywhere.â
He looked around at them all. The humans stared back. Indeed, at times in the recent past, Sandy had wondered just how human she actually was, given that the origins of the technology that made her were in fact Talee. But now, confronted with this mesmerising horror, these multiple lost millennia, these untold billions of lives erased, an entire speciesâ future and present abruptly shattered and nearly lost forever . . . she
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