21

Revelation

"What do you mean, they're human?!" Davidson called out, alarmed.

Miradima sat in stunned silence, her face still pale. Helen could clearly tell that whatever was going on, this was the first she was learning about it.

"I mean that either the people of this system came here from Earth, or at some point in the past, we left here and colonized Earth ourselves," Helen told him sharply, frowning at his apparent inability to comprehend what she had just told him. "Either way, they are practically the same species as we are."

Davidson looked toward Miradima, then turned back to Helen, then back at Miradima, before stepping over to Miradima's side and crouching down to her level. "You didn't know," he said, his statement not a question.

Miradima's face looked bleak. "I-I..."

Helen stepped toward another of the chairs in the lab, lowering herself into it. Her feet hurt from standing, and she wanted to draw Miradima out on what she likely did know. "I didn't quite expect this reaction," she admitted.

Miradima's head snapped to Helen, her eyes watery, but she said nothing.

"How deep does this go?" Davidson asked, his voice barely above a whisper. "Who else knows about this?"

Miradima angrily wiped her eyes. "I will find out," she said roughly, tapping her communicator. "Fleet intelligence, Priority One."

After a moment, a message came through. "Fleet Intelligence," the gruff voice at the end replied.

"I need to speak to the Director of Fleet Intelligence at once," she barked.

"The Director of Fleet Intelligence is in a high-level meeting and-"

"Tell him the Fleet Commander is calling and has discovered some disturbing news he is going to want to address immediately!" She practically shouted back.

A pause. "Yes Commander." The connection went dead.

Davidson dragged one of the lab chairs next to Miradima and sat in it, taking her hand and giving it a firm squeeze. She squeezed back. Helen sighed.

After a few minutes, there was a communication request. "Fleet Intelligence Priority One Channel. Do you wish to accept?" The voice of the ships' systems announced.

"Yes," Miradima said in a monotone.

There was a dual tone, then another voice came over the audio systems, only this one was deep, gruff, and sounded rather annoyed at whatever it was that had been interrupted beforehand. "Fleet Intelligence."

"Fleet Command," Miradima replied, equally gruff in her response. "This is a high level discussion. We probably shouldn't be discussing it over a communication channel," she told whoever was on the other end of the communicator.

"What's this about, Miradima?"

Helen was surprised. Whoever the Director was, he knew Miradima's voice.

She wasn't. "It's about who we are and where we came from, and I have discovered some unsettling news."

The pause this time was even more significant. "Send me coordinates. We'll discuss this face-to-face." The communication went dead.

Miradima stood from her seat and approached a console on the wall, quickly tapping in some data and sending it. Within seconds, a single flash of a transport took place, and a tall, imposing figure stood before them. He was dressed in an unadorned upper torso wrap common to civilians on the Tau Cetian home-world, paired with dark slacks and civilian footwear that appeared rather sober in terms of color. Helen had seen this man's face before, albeit only once.

"Darlamar," Miradima exclaimed, her face turning from pale to red in an instant. "You know something, don't you?"

"I was under the impression you had retired on health grounds recently," Davidson accused.

"Both of you, stop!" Darlamar's voice held a stern reprimand, which was effective though he didn't even give a hint that he had raised his voice. "I will answer your questions, but you need to get your thoughts in order before this situation spirals out of control."

How exactly is that going to happen, Helen thought to herself angrily. Humanity had been kept in the dark about this, had effectively been lied to, had assumed that the Klankharis Realm were composed of alien beings from another world, and now, they find out that the people of the Klankharis Realm were human beings all along. Someone had to have made this connection before, yet nothing had ever been hinted at this before.

Just how deep did this conspiracy go?

"How long have you known?" Miradima asked in a barely restrained whisper. Helen could hear her own fury mirrored in that statement.

"Years," Darlamar said in a sharp tone. "It is strictly controlled information among our people for reasons I will only explain when there is no longer an atmosphere of incandescent fury in this room."

Helen rose to her feet, outraged. "How the fuck are we meant to feel about this?!" She shouted.

Darlamar frowned, having not understood what she had said as she had, in her anger, spoken out in English.

Both Miradima and Davidson were on their feet, approaching Helen with arms outstretched in placating fashion. "Helen," Davidson said to her gently. "We need answers, and we won't get them like that."

She turned sharply toward him, and was about to angrily retort, when Miradima spoke up.

"I'm just as enraged as you are," she said in a whisper that embodied all manner of pent up anger. "There will be a reckoning over this, but we won't get answers unless we restrain ourselves," she said with finality.

Helen relented, sitting back down, but her fury was right there, at the surface of her thoughts.

Miradima turned to Darlamar, switching to Tau Cetian. "What you ask is unreasonable," she said in a controlled tone. "We can control the manner we address you, but we cannot control our emotional state so quickly over something like this."

"You are the Fleet Commander," Darlamar told her in curt reprimand. "You should have better control over your emotional state."

"How dare you," Miradima replied quietly, while embodying all of the pent up outrage that Helen felt over that callous dismissal of their feelings regarding this Earth-shattering revelation. "We have just uncovered news that will shake the very foundations of our society and has implications across both the people of Earth and our own system, and you dare to lecture me on emotional control?"

"I do," Darlamar replied simply. "It is because this is so critical to both our people that this news must be looked at with a rational and objective viewpoint. Now I will leave you in this room to collect yourselves, and head to your quarters to discuss this. Take this time to get yourselves under control before we discuss this any further."

And with that, Darlamar strode out of the lab without further comment, not looking back or even pausing in his stride for the doors to fully open.

Miradima turned to Davidson, the muscles in her jawline tensing and releasing in anger, her face reddening even more. Without another word, Davidson drew her to him, wrapping his arms around her, and she let out an angry sob, loosing pent-up fury in a series of hisses and shakes as she did.

Helen felt her own eyes burn, fully understanding the anger, and decided she had best sit back down.

Shortly afterward, the three of them approached the Ship Commander's quarters, where Miradima had set up residence while aboard ship. As expected, Darlamar was waiting for them, a stony expression on his face. Deliberately avoiding antagonizing the man any further, and determined to get answers for this deceit, Miradima, Helen and Davidson agreed to say nothing until they were all present and seated.

As Miradima, the last to sit, took her position behind her own desk, Darlamar looked to each of the people present in turn, and immediately admonished them. "What you are about to hear is dangerous information to know. If others were to find out about it before they were prepared, it would have disastrous consequences to every human being alive, and would not only put both our peoples at risk, but also decimate the Realm, and by extension, the fledgling alliance that we have all spent a long time planning. You must discuss this with no-one outside this room, and you must ensure that all data you collected regarding your discoveries is placed under the highest Fleet Intelligence classification seal. I will not continue this discussion unless these explicit and non-negotiable instructions are clearly understood. Do you all agree to these terms?"

Helen, along with the other two, nodded her assent. She had little choice.

"Very well," Darlamar said gravely, standing to pace. "Do all of you know the basics of Klankharis history, and how far it goes back?"

Helen felt she had a loose idea, but wasn't sure.

Davidson spoke up. "Your recorded history goes back approximately five thousand years. It ends rather abruptly at that point."

Darlamar nodded. "Yes," he acknowledged. "That was the first possessor interstellar invasion. Most of our early history concerning the event is limited to Fleet Intelligence, although some references to the reformation of our way of life make reference to the Possessors. Here's what happened during that time, and why our history abruptly terminates there."

Darlamar went on to explain in substantial detail, how at the beginning of their current recorded history, there was a colossal force of possessor ships. At that point in history, the enemy were using bio-synthetic ships that used propulsive designs relying on Einsteinian mechanics, sub-luminal vessels traveling at relativistic velocities. It often took an invading force hundreds of years to travel just ten light years, not factoring in their need to decelerate and accelerate at their destination and departure systems. They had detected radio-frequency signals that had been transmitted from Tau Ceti 3 almost seven hundred years prior as the Tau Cetian people were re-introducing their communications infrastructure on the surface, switching out complex, expensive and sometimes unreliable wiring systems (in regions of tectonic instability they would have to repair these frequently) for rugged radio-transmission stations. There was only a brief window of opportunity for these signals to be detected plainly, as within a few decades, much like Earth, the Tau Cetians developed digital wireless technology that masked the nature of their transmissions so they could only be read and intercepted by those who knew the technology.

However, that window was nonetheless detected by the Possessors, and they sent a large invasion force. They did so, because the Tau Cetian people were a known quantity and an enemy they had fought before, so they suspected an expeditionary force would fail, not return, and would instead alert the Tau Cetians that an invasion was imminent.

While it took over 700 years for the invasion force to arrive, the Tau Cetian people had not developed much past their own habitable world for fear of alerting their enemy, based upon events that had happened five thousand years or so before this time.

"Wait, what events?" Davidson asked.

"I'll come to that shortly, I assure you," Darlamar admonished, before continuing.

He then went on to explain that the invasion force overwhelmed the Tau Cetians who had neither significant weaponry nor faster-than-light travel, limiting their options for escape or combat. The invasion force overwhelmed the Tau Cetian people and enslaved the population, turning their world into a staging ground for future incursions into nearby systems.

Immediately an underground resistance had formed, and was quashed, but the pattern had been established. Over the course of the next half a century, resistance cells would spring up, operating independently, with only one goal. Their mission was to escape Possessor influence or drive them out of Tau Ceti, and in the absence of either option, to escape the Tau Ceti system and find another world to quietly exist in so they could build a retaliatory force to strike back at some point in the future.

Darlamar largely skipped over the struggles their people faced while in this dark time, but he did state that the occupation ended with the Possessors deciding to raze the entire planet and kill off all of the humans left alive. Eighty-seven ships had escaped Tau Ceti at the end of the occupation, yet only twenty-three survived to return to Tau Ceti, doing so as a last-stand desperate move, only to find the Tau Ceti system unoccupied once more. Whatever the Possessors needed Tau Ceti for, they no longer had any desire to stay once the human population no longer existed there.

That invasion had cost the lives of more than a billion people, the largest population that had existed in Tau Ceti at that time.

Darlamar then explained that two thousand years ago, after slowly and carefully building their military power and their technology back up through careful research and constant attempts to camouflage their existence, the Tau Cetians were again invaded. This time, an expeditionary force had been sent after one of the Tau Cetian scout vessels had been spotted on the edge of the system.

On this occasion, The Klankharis Realm, as it was now known, had forcibly and effortlessly repelled the expeditionary force, pressing their advantage and sending ships out to locate the enemy. Now possessing FTL technology, the Klankharis Realm were able to move quickly from one system to another to scour them for the presence of their enemy, and in doing so, they happened to rediscover Earth.

Three hundred years ago, the Realm decided to send a small exploratory group of people to learn about the various groups on the planet. This was their first exposure to multi-government society on a single planet, having lived almost their entire history as one people with one governing structure for everyone. This was the beginning of the Modern era, with rail and steam power well-established but electricity only now appearing in various applications throughout the modern world. It was a time when great ocean liners were just beginning to use steam as a replacement for sail, and big ocean liners like the Olympic class were many decades off. It was also the time they discovered the ruins of the Great Pyramids of Giza, and numerous sites across the planet where similar pyramidal structures had been built, seemingly as a means of revering what they thought of as Gods. Some of the hieroglyphs used in the sites around various pyramids in Egypt resembled early Tau Cetian writings, leading to the conclusion that Earth and Tau Ceti had a shared history. Future groups going back with sensitive instrumentation and a clear mandate to examine below the surface of Earth around Egypt would later discover the truth, that the Tau Cetian people of the Klankharis Realm once lived on Earth, the reason for their departure unknown.

Over the years, countries would be watched and monitored, and the results caused a schism in Tau Cetian society, with many citing the connection between Earth and Tau Ceti as a reason to re-establish contact, while others were decrying Earth as a backward, barbaric planet devoid of worth and best ignored completely, or worse, bombarded out of existence.

"Those elements lost in the civil war that followed," Darlamar commented. "An incident that is not in the history books except as a misunderstanding regarding a nearby world. The details themselves are classified."

Darlamar then gave a very brief discussion of the fragments of the history they were able to piece together of their time before current records, how the discovery of a wreckage near a peninsula of the southernmost continent on Tau Ceti 3 had revealed their origins, based on far older yet slightly-more-advanced technology, and how they had discovered that this was one of an uncounted number of refugee ships to travel eleven light years from the Sol system, from Earth, and based on Klankharis scouting missions back to the Sol system, the discovery that they had previously settled on the surface of Mars.

Much of it was speculative, and very little of it was based off of more than a few corroded artifacts from the surface of both planets as well as off of similar designs found on Tau Ceti 3 during their resurgence, but enough existed to convince the Klankharis Realm leadership that this connection was worth investigating.

Darlamar finished by recounting a brief statement about the arrival of the Tau Ceti in their system, how the vessel was made possible thanks to an anonymous benefactor who had set up on Earth as a philanthropist that had come into large sums of money thanks to a tech boom he had been responsible for. No-one on Earth had ever been told who this person was, but Darlamar knew the man intimately, because the man was his distant uncle, and had left for Earth seventy years earlier, when Darlamar was a young child.

Helen was not surprised to learn that Tau Cetian humans lived a lot longer than Earth humans, and though Darlamar looked like a fifty-year-old man from Earth, albeit a very healthy and athletic one, she was not surprised to learn of his true age.

"The Klankharis Realm has had a hand in the development of your space program since the early twenty-first century of the western calendar," he told them. "We wished to reconnect with your people despite the increasing division among our own, and thus we sent someone to lay the ground-work, seed designs using technology readily-available on Earth, and provide as much funding as was needed. By unifying our people, we stand a greater chance of preventing the enemy from returning and overwhelming us."

"How so?" Davidson asked. "Your technology is centuries ahead of our own. We stood no chance when the Possessor enemy came down to Earth and decimated our population."

Darlamar sighed, sitting down at long last. "Davidson, it is not merely about technological prowess or how many ships we can field. Those are factors, certainly, but we are not doing this because we need the help of the humans as some sort of wildcard. We are doing this because our heritage is shared, and because we are not the kind of monsters that would let our fellow human beings be invaded, suffer and die at the hands of an implacable enemy just because your people were not tactically significant to us."

Davidson nodded. Helen was relieved.

"In any event, now you know our history. One day, both our people will be ready to hear the facts and exalt in our shared history as a people, but for now, we need to tread carefully. Your people are still recovering from their recent invasion, and our own are not ready to accept Earth humans as being related to them. This is why we have not disclosed it widely."

Helen didn't like it.

Davidson clearly hated it.

Miradima stared off into the distance through the transparent portal in her ship's office, out toward the planet they were orbiting. Finally, she sighed heavily. "I hate keeping these kinds of secrets from our allies, from our friends, from the people we have come to respect," she said in resignation. "I especially don't like being a party to the deception that we are an alien species to our own people, especially when Walter here did not know of it, and could very well have had good reason to assume I was being dishonest."

"Mira, what?"

"-That alone is unforgivable."

Davidson frowned at Miradima. He held his tongue, however.

"But I recognize it's necessity," she finally admitted. "I just hope our descendants can forgive us when they eventually find out the truth," she added dejectedly.

Helen could understand her concern on that front. She nonetheless hoped for a positive outcome when it eventually came to light.