Quoted By:
“I have no desire to send a warning. I have no wish to make a statement. I am not here to build upon their soil, demand their labor, or conquer their hard-earned wealth.
I am here for their extermination: to raze their cities and salt the earth beneath.
I reiterate this fact to myself as I consider my choices. Launching another strike at MIZAR-IX was a viable option, but it wasn’t a rational one. The colony is small. The majority of its inhabitants are already dead. And most importantly, it is more useful to me crippled than vaporized. Purging the facility of residual radiation and reactivating its communication array would demand a massive, time-consuming operation that would drain resources for months – perhaps even years. More importantly, it would siphon manpower and protection away from the populated inner system, where densely packed colonies and waterlogged planets languish in the gentle light of the system’s off-blue main sequence star.
This brings me to the inner system. I finally saw it in detail yesterday, after MERRYGATE made a significant breakthrough in decrypting the aliens’ visual/symbolic language system. A statistical analysis of in-system traffic and aggregated video data revealed robust correlations between specific objects and recurring visual-motifs. In crude terms, it is equivalent to extracting or two relevant keywords from an extended conversation.
It wasn't nearly enough to make significant inferences about their society, but it did render the map MERRYGATE retrieved last week readable in combination with existing navigational data. Now, I possess a sketch of their home. I know which planets have been colonized. Which moons have ship-docks and orbital habitats. I even know the location of their home world: the sphere where their ancestors first escaped the clutches of their salt-water ocean to sail into the stars beyond.”
- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, JAN 25, PERSONAL JOURNAL
