Alrick McCreadie was a busy man. Well, that was what he told everyone who wanted to know.

For a strange change, this was true for the first time in his life. Sadly, it was not for any good reasons. Since the year 7165 he was working on exploiting the chaos, the resources spend on the war effort, which incidentally meant that there were less resources spent at controlling what he and likeminded individuals were doing.

And he did not even want to exploit it for financial gain or something like that. No, his goal was revenge.

Revenge for what? Simple. For the natives of Kas’Aron daring to be found by an official UE exploration team. And daring to show that team who was responsible for their exploitation. The impudence of those primitives!

How dare they do anything against their betters, against his family. And now, in three months they would pay. Maybe he could even take some slaves in the chaos, recouping his investment at least a bit?

That sounded like a great idea. Something to organize latter.

Ugh, more work. Planning revenge on some primitives was difficult. How dare it be this difficult. Now, admittedly, if it were easy, his father, god bless his soul, would have taken care of it.

He laughed to himself as he received a report from a trusted accomplice. That the primitives of Kas’Aron, as they called their earth, were not human made things a lot easier. Yeah, yeah, there were parts of the genetic code that looked similar, but likely chance or a very distant ancestor. That earth had diverged a long time ago.

Why did it make things easier? Well, first, there were groups who were against any non-humans being allowed the protection of the Protectorates. Which meant he had actually a fairly large (if not significant) pool of accomplices.

And second, and far more relevant for his plans, it made it easier to design a bioweapon that would harm only Kas’Aron and not spread to the rest of the UE. Which would be bad, considering he lived in it.

And, considering that no one could guess that he was behind the attack, this was a very relevant factoid.

In three moths, somewhere in the last two weeks of December 7171 the weapon which was in the last stages of testing (sadly only virtual testing, he was unable to acquire any specimens from Kas’Aron, only their DNA) would be deployed.

Over the next two weeks, nothing much would be happening. A long incubation time would make it even sweeter when those traitors would begin to drop like flies.

The scientists were guaranteeing him a death rate of over 50% and up to 90%. But they could not be sure, considering how little data was publicly available about the natives. And digging to deep would be dangerous.

He was a bit obsessed with his revenge, not stupid!

Spoiler with the short summary:

Aldrick McCreadie plans to attack the non-human intelligent population of the Protectorate of Kas'Aron with a bioweapon. He sees them responsible for a huge (well, huge in absolute terms, not relative ones) setback of his families company, because they had been found by the UE while that family company was exploiting them (and thus breaking one of the few sacred laws of the UE.

The attack will start during the last two weeks of January, 7172. Planning began 7165. He plans to make a bit of money on the side, to recoup his costs, by enslaving some of the natives. But this is not for profit, but revenge.

He is a bit stupid, to be honest and thinks that no one could evert catch him.

Death rate of the bioweapon is somewhere between 50% and 90%.

The attack on Kas’Aron would change the UE forever. Just not in the way the instigator had hoped. The Protectorates got even more support, and the programs meant to find abuses as the one the McCreadie Mining Company had been responsible for, where massively expanded.

Today, we could not imagine that someone would be so callous with intelligent life. Sadly, in his time, Alrick McCreadie was not the only man with such ideas. And even more shockingly, some of those were in the upper echelons of the UE military, which would rear its ugly head in the assault on Andraskon, the main staging world of the Kyreikon Empire (Terras Universe) in the region of space were Earth lies.

After those events, as well as a number of smaller ones, massive education reforms were forced on all member nations of the UE, excluding the Protectorates, although even there the UE came close to breaker its non-interference policy, to prevent such tragedies from ever recurring again.

As time would show, it was not 100% successful with this goal, but the amount of attacks that the authorities were informed of while those were still in the planning phase, skyrocketed, while the overall amount of planned attacks decreased.

Which is why the reforms are generally seen as a complete success, even though there still are racist attacks. Luckily, nothing on the scale of Kas’Aron has ever repeated itself in the Protectorates.

Still, even though attacks have reduced, both in scale as in quantity, we need to be ever vigilant. The attack on Kas’Aron, especially in its scale, deviousness, and destruction came out of nothing, or at least that was what was thought during it.

Today, with the power of hindsight, and having access to the internal documents of the McCreadie family, we have a much better idea from where and, more importantly, from when the attack came. The attack was an embarrassment for a number of important politicians in member states which were anti-Protectorate. Which certainly helped getting the reforms through, considering that the strongest voices against them either needed to thread very carefully, or were in prison, awaiting trial.

There is another discussion in which the name Kas’Aron is often mentioned: the discussion about the reintroduction of the death penalty. Its Supporters say that it is incomprehensible that those disgusting men and women, responsible for the death of over a million people, were allowed to live. Admittedly, that was a life in prison, and the authorities were very much watching that any and every regulation was followed to the letter, and they did not get anything but what was required by the law, but it was still a life, while their many, many victims had none.

But the other side both that coin is that the death penalty has never solved an issue. It prevent costs, but it does not, because you want to be damn certain that the one you kill is actually guilty, considering you cannot simply resurrect him, give him an sorry about the inconvenience payment and let him be after you killed him. Our technology can do a lot of things, resurrection is sadly not yet in the cards.

And thus, unless you can guarantee he is guilty, and you can guarantee that his crimes will always and forever be seen as bad enough for him to die, the UE and most of its population is of the opinion that the death penalty shall be absolved.

And those things are in the realm of gods, if they are even possible at all.