Max was more than a little confused by the Giant’s outburst. They had never seen anything like this before, not even in Nico’s memories or Max’s own. There were some similarities to the Dreamcast vessels from his past life, but they weren’t as pointy as this was, and they certainly weren’t as heavily armed, as their pilots could move between regular space and something else that they called the Dream, simply vanishing when they were under threat.

“I had never seen anything like this before the design was completed. It’s in the same design scheme as our Comor Pattern Mecha and the new space vessels, but Absolution is a completely unique vessel, as far as we know.” Max explained.

The Giant tapped his way through a few sites on his data tablet, then activated a hologram over the table. Displayed was a twisted and evil version of Absolution, not exactly the same, but certainly similar enough to be shocking.

If he had been asked, the version that the Giant had presented seemed like the version that Nico would have designed, not Absolution. It had a certain demonic and evil vibe to it that made the skin crawl just by looking at it.

The Giant looked at the image with a hint of fear and cleared his throat. “That is Death, in the language of my people. Only what it actually represents is much worse. We have no idea what species pilots it. Only similarly designed vessels will descend on a planet from that mothership, and in a matter of hours, the entire population will be gone.

Not dead, for the most part. They take them all as slaves, but as soon as the ship vanishes again, all transmissions from them are cut off, and they are never seen again. We don’t know where it comes from or why it targets the locations that it does, but it has been a scourge on the far side of the Universe since before my people had a language to record it in.

We have shot down many of its smaller vessels in the past, but nobody has ever gotten to see who is inside of them and live long enough to send out a transmission. They don’t leave their fallen behind, not even scraps of damaged vessels, to study.

I apologize for panicking, but for a moment, I thought that they were here, set to harvest billions of humans at once.”

He was visibly shaking by the time he finished explaining, and the Innu Envoy offered him the remainder of her coffee to calm him down. The tart taste of raspberry juice, mixed with cinnamon and latte, was enough to pop his eyes wide open and shake his thoughts out of a past battle that he had observed when that vessel had shown up.

“Is it just that one ship?” Max asked.

“If there were more than one of them, entire species would be eliminated. Every time, the ship is identical. There are three hundred smaller vessels launched from it, using an unknown energy weapon that disables but does not kill, and the victims are teleported aboard. It’s not a transport portal but some form of direct transport beam. It might be a very high-speed tractor beam, but we don’t have enough data to be sure.

The creepiest part of it all is that they don’t actually take everyone. They leave ten percent of the population of the planet behind in hiding. At first, we thought it meant that they couldn’t detect certain hiding spots, but every time it is exactly ten percent. One time an entire population stood against them, and still, they left ten percent behind.

It’s like they’re harvesting a crop and leaving behind seeds for it to regrow like they’re coming back at some later date to do it again.”

Max shuddered as he recalled a similar tactic from his past life. The Dirge used to use a similar tactic to gather slaves for their customers. Their ships looked very different from that, but it made Max wonder if he was actually just on the far side of the Universe from his last life. Probability said that patterns would repeat given enough repetition, and a random pattern generator would eventually create the combined works of any great author.

The Universe seemed to favour certain patterns, or perhaps it wasn’t as random as it seemed, and the species he had seen were all guided by an outside force, but either way, the probability that he would see similar evils to his past life seemed increasingly likely.

“Well, I can say for sure that this ship came from the twisted mind of my second in command and her Innu assistants, so it is not a harbinger of great evil. But it is a great upgrade in the maximum technology level that humans have achieved, which is why I wanted you all to see it in the first place.

We are here to recruit to staff the ship, and we will make three more stops after this as well so that our new operations center has a wide variety of humans aboard. There will be space for others, of course, both as visitors and as staff, but we do intend to keep it as a primarily human crew.” Max explained

“That is understandable. If you are trying to make a place for your species, it won’t do to be seen as the lackeys of another species. I wonder what the Federation forces on the far side of human space will think of this? They come grovelling and begging to Alliance territory every few years and get rejected for not meeting the minimum technological standards for intervention, and they are bound to find out about your new development soon enough.” The Valkia Envoy suggested.

Max considered his words for a moment, then searched the sensor data from Terminus to see what he was talking about since his thoughts said it should be obvious what he meant.

There was a Vampire ship, with its signature sails raised, coming out from behind one of the inner planet’s moons.

Looking at the Vampire’s vessel and then at Absolution, there were some similarities, but the angular lines of the vampire ship reminded Max more of the vessel that the Giant was so afraid of.

One thing he had learned from Dave as a child was that there were no coincidences in life, only scams in progress and recruitment efforts. If the Vampires culture was emulating a design, it likely meant that they had seen something like it in the past, and that would be valuable information before this Galaxy saw whatever had been wiping out planets of Giants and their allies.