Ivan Kal - Olympus

“Why?” He asked.

“The Union was attacked.” She responded.

“Why is that relevant to them coming here?”

“They were looking for habitable planets far away from their territory to settle.” She said.

“They were losing?” Tomas asked.

She nodded “Yes, and badly. They were attacked by an unknown force, at the beginning they didn’t even know what was happening, they were losing contact with planets, and every ship they sent to investigate failed to return. So they assembled a fleet and sent it to investigate. What returned was only one badly damaged ship. It reported that they were attacked by an unknown enemy, with superior technology. And from the little records we found in the databases they were far more advanced than the Union, more on the lines with what we expected to find with this ship. The Union tried diplomacy but the attackers didn’t even bother to respond, they just kept taking planets, killing their populations and settling their own. The Union tried to close the gap technologically but they were too far behind, only thing they could do was slow them down in hope that someday they might match them. By the time the Union finally realized that they had no chance they were fighting for 400 years, and have lost more than 60% of their territory. So they decided to save as many people as they could, they sent survey ships in the opposite direction than the invaders in hope of finding an unpopulated part of the galaxy where they could start again. The ship that carried the one we found on Earth was such a ship, they were here about thirteen thousand years ago, and have been traveling for around a hundred years, the race that was in charge of the ship was one of the longer lived races of the Union they could reach five thousand years of age.”

“They traveled for a hundred years? How fast were they going?” Tomas asked.

“Very fast, we aren’t really sure how they did it but there are mentions of them using something they called translanes to travel between stars. We have no idea what those are whether it is something artificial or natural, we weren’t able to figure out the math at all, and there is no mention of anything that they have found on the ship concerning that, we know they used this translanes from their historical data. And we managed to pull a few star charts from the data, the Union territory was directly on the other side of the galactic core from us, in the Perseus galactic arm, and the Union believed that the invaders came from the outer side of the Scutum-Centaurus arm.” She said.

Tomas let out a long breath, she knew that he was holding it in for better part of her report, but also knew that his worries were ungrounded, if the Union hadn’t come back to Earth in the last thirteen thousand years, they most likely won’t be back at all.

He leaned back on and said. “Anything else in the database regarding the reason why they left a ship here.”

“No, the database apart from being corrupted doesn’t seem to have much information regarding the Union state at the time. I believe that we have accessed the files that the crew of the scout ship had with them or have specifically transferred, since there seem to be many gaps. The war with the invaders being one such, only historical data is available and it’s lacking at least a hundred years of the war. There is no reason specified for leaving the ship here, the AI also doesn’t have any information on that, but most of his databases were corrupted. They most likely planned to come back and were unable. Either they met their end somewhere on their journey, or have returned to the Union. Judging from the way the war was going before they started on their journey, if they had went straight home from Earth, they would have arrived just before the Union’s defeat.”

“You assume that the Union couldn’t have survived.” He said.

“We have done extensive projections based on the historical data we had available. There was no chance of Union survival. They might have delayed the end by a couple hundred years but there was nothing else they could have done, they were too badly outmatched.”

“Do you believe that whoever attacked them could come here?”

“The chance of that happening are slim to none, even the arrival of the Union ship on Earth was a very unlikely event, and this is even more unlikely. The galaxy is vast, there were many more possible venues of expansion much closer to their side of the galaxy. The only reason the Union came here was because they wanted to go somewhere they wouldn’t be found. So no, there is almost no chance of that happening.”

“And yet, we now know that there are many races out there, there is a chance that one of them might find us sooner rather than later.” He said.

“Yes there is a chance of that. But in the addition of regular Union star charts we recovered some survey data from this region of space that the ship took before coming to Earth. It seems that our part of space is sparsely populated, and according to the survey our closest neighbors are at least 100 light years away, and at the time of their survey they haven’t developed any technology, they had barley started using tools.”

“Well that makes me feel a bit better, but they still had thirteen thousand years to advance.”

“And so did we.” She said with a smile.

“Anything else I need to know?”

“Nothing else, we still haven’t translated the parts of the data that are in other languages, nor have we finished reading the translated parts yet, and there are still a few items on the ship we couldn’t identify.”

“Alright then, I guess that we are done here. You can return to your project and I have a lot of adjustments to make to my plans.” Tomas said rising from his seat.

“Alright, I’ll send you the written copy of the report.” She said taping her datapad a few times.

“Thank you Seo-yun. It looks like the things are about to get very interesting.”

August 2093 – Eleven years later

Elias Bakas, head of security for Olympus ran down the streets of some backwater village in southern Venezuela at full sprint trying to keep himself from getting shot. The hostile forces weren’t supposed to be there and yet they were shooting at him. His team was running ahead of him, all three of them that were still in the game, the rest of his nine men team have been taken out in the ambush. Elias slid down the ground and into a house through a hole in the wall. The house was poorly built and didn’t provide much cover other than from sight. The enemy bullets ripped through the walls of the small village house all around him, some bouncing off the ground or inner walls and striking his armor. He wore a new generation of powered nano battlesuits developed by Olympus, the suit itself weighed about 60 kg and was made from new type of nano carbon fibers, courtesy of the research derived from the alien craft they found eleven years ago. The suit itself was powered by three of the new type of batteries developed by Olympus, they were earth technology inspired by alien concepts, and could store enormous amounts of energy for their size, they were small and could fit just beneath the armor without making it seem bulky like some previous attempts at a powered suit. And the adaptive energized nano technology made it much stronger than the previous incarnations as well. It could run mostly unpowered on its user’s strength alone without losing any protection. The battlesuit was capable of repairing itself, though that capability draws heavily on its power reserves, or boosting the user’s strength or speed, but one of the most important breakthroughs was the ability to control all suit systems by implants. The wearer of the suit could turn on and off the suits systems with a mental command, conserving energy ensuring that the suit doesn’t run out of energy in tight situations. Elias turned his attention to the HUD in his helmet, it displayed various information concerning the suit. The information he needed to address now was displayed in the right top corner. Representation of the suit was showing there, with its lower back flashing red, indicating that he had taken a bullet there. He had barely felt the impact, the suits armor was good for a couple of shots in the same place, but the hit had actually damaged one of the power lines of the suit, meaning that the power to any systems below his hips was cut off, meaning his speed was severely reduced as he would need to move using just his own power. He jumped through the door deeper into the house were his team was. As he passed inside two members of his team positioned themselves at the door and covered the hole they came in. One covered the window at the back of the house. Elias came to his feet in the middle of the room, he checked his power reserves and calculated time and amount of energy the suit would spend to repair damage to the power line. The damage wasn’t big, just critical, and it would take at least 2 minutes for the nanites in his suit to repair it, but would also push his energy reserves down to 30%. He activated the self-repair program, and approached the window. The fire from outside had stopped.