Andrew Saxon: Finding keepers

“Yes; but not for 380 years in real time. I have communicated with the province and they have also lost all of their teleportation devices. We no longer possess a ship that can travel faster than the speed of light.”

“Will we make it back if we accelerate right up to light speed?”

“I will, but you will not. Even at extreme relativity, you will die of starvation two hundred years before I can make it back.

Ales looked out where the Stars Realm’s home galaxy had once been and began shaking. Surely the Queen will not let all of them die. She just can’t let that happen. Then he knew. They had seen his attempted attack on Ross and knew about Del Robles.

He never found out. Twenty Searchers angered at being led into a death trap fired on Ales’ ship and he died instantly. The two Admirals were the next to die. All the other high ranking officers of the Provinces were killed quickly by the angry Searchers. For those that killed them, death smiled and waited patiently. The Searchers just didn’t discover that until much later. Of the thirty million Searchers that came to attack the Stars Realm, only six died of starvation, still years away from home. The others intentionally triggered their ship’s self-destruct circuits.

The Provincial Wars started two hundred years later and blasted most of the former members of the Realm back into coal, electricity, and agricultural societies. Those were the lucky ones. More than fifty thousand planets were killed in the early fighting with no survivors. Millions of others were blasted into radioactive ashes. For those that struggled in the aftermath, just like the humans that were held captive on the Keepers’ farms, they longed for the days of the Stars Realm. Two thousand years later, the legends of the Giants that were named Gardner still persisted. The former members of the late Stars Realm prayed for forgiveness and longed for the return of the mythical creators of a Realm that no longer existed.