891 891 Detected
The Darklings weren’t as unaware of Max’s observations as the Arisen Army was, it seemed. Not long after he noticed their mass arrival in the other layer of space, they sent a small attack craft to block the millimetre-sized micro portal that he had opened to watch the other layer.
They didn’t attack it or attempt to interfere with it. They just put a ship in front of it so that he couldn’t see anything but a small piece of hull.
For a group that was known to capture and enslave entire populations, it was an ingenious trick and one that would work with regular portals as well.
If you knew where they were going to open, you could just put a ship on the other side and let everyone come through directly into your holding cells.
But though Max couldn’t see anything with the sensors, he now had a much more informative source of information. The crew themselves.
At first, it was nothing but the most basic of crew interactions, but once they were settled in place, Max could get much more from their minds.
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That was both helpful and incredibly frustrating at the same time. Now he knew that there really was something watching him from the shadows, but he didn’t know how to find it, or really even what it was, since the description of ‘violent’ wasn’t really clear enough to narrow down what species they were talking about.
For all he knew, it could be a deity worshipped by part of their own faction.
Then the group’s thoughts turned to the meeting that was going on in the distance. The ships had gathered for a larger attack on the Arisen Army, and the hatred for them was palpable.
Their thoughts flicked back and forth too fast to gather everything they were thinking, but from what Max gathered, much of the technology and some of the ships that the Arisen used were gathered from an attack on the Darkling’s cousins, and they viewed it as the greatest of insults to imitate their War Walkers with the spirit of an Arisen inside of them.
Max had already suspected that the War Walkers were simply possessed by an energy being, but having confirmation was a great reassurance. It also meant that the Arisen were never truly being killed. They were just ejected from their possessed bodies and returned to whatever home vessel they had waiting.
Max wondered if they were related somehow to the energy beings that he referred to as the Demons since they also turned to energy when their bodies were destroyed. It would make some sense for them to be related since he had seen both in this layer of space, and both were extremely hostile.
They didn’t seem to be the same, though, because the Darklings were keeping watch for the Undying Ones, as well as the Arisen. The names suggested a relation, but perhaps it was just a matter of literal translation from their language to the human standard that Max used in his thoughts. The names were essentially a basic observation of the species. One didn’t really die, and the other kept coming back to life when they possessed a new body.
Then the thoughts turned to more basic daily things, like the new Galen pet that the leader of the crew got in the last attack. It seemed that the Galen was chained down on the floor in the leader’s bedroom, waiting for them to return with directions to greet them warmly and prepare their nightclothes.
That was the pet Galen’s entire purpose in life now. They greeted the Commander and put out the Commander’s pyjamas. That was it. Other than that, they were chained to the floor and simply waited all day long. Even the other Darklings thought it was insulting and a waste, but it seemed that the Commander had been offended in some way, and this was a punishment.
Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be an engineer, weapon repair tech or other specialists on this attack craft for Max to mind-read, so he was limited in what he could learn.
He had still picked up a little bit of useful information, though, and he had gotten a good interior layout of the attack craft, which he could relay to Nico, so her team could see if there was a design reason for some of the odd flowing shapes of the doors and walls.
The skulls and weapons were obviously decorations, but the hull of the ship seemed to be a more ancient design than the more brutalist interior decorations as if they had been making them that way before they were used as military ships.
Then, just when Max was about to give up, they received a message from the main fleet that caught his attention.
[You can leave the ones from the Ancestral Home who are watching from the Eternal Battlefield. They are not going to attack. They are too busy trying to reverse-engineer technology from before the Arisen woke up again.]
That was true, even if it felt like Max was being mocked for trying to develop technology from a historical relic. The research team was now working on trying to analyze the shape of the attack craft’s interior. But it seemed that while the Darklings could see what they were doing, they hadn’t realized that the humans had just learned it from the Attack Craft.
If they had realized, they would be much more annoyed at the trickery. But the main force was completely focused on their attack on the Arisen Army, and Max could see that they were going all out this time, with over a thousand large vessels in the fleet plan and an opposing force of hundreds of Arisen Cubes and larger ships.
That scale of battle here in Koleska Territory would completely destabilize the region, which was likely why they were fighting in the other layer. Or perhaps it just wasn’t easy to lure the Arisen out of hiding, so they were hitting them at home.