Seo-yun sighed and said simply “War.”
“War?” Tomas asked confused “What does war have to do with anything.”
She eyed him for a short second and then said “Think about it. Humanity has waged wars since its birth, whether against nature or against one another. There is almost no period since we started recording history in which we haven’t fought a war in one way or another, even now after the most destructive war we ever had, we still squabble among ourselves. Every one of our technological advances had come from preparing for war, or immediately after, when we needed to get an edge for the next one. Of course there have been advances that haven’t been motivated by the military, but even those are in a way conceived for war. War against our competitors, to get an edge on a market, to earn wealth or take over your opponents business.”
“And it isn’t so in this Union.” He asked.
“Not at all. First you need to understand where and how these races evolved. Most every one of the Union races evolved to be either on the top of the food chain, or outside of it, they evolved with no competition, and as soon as they reached a point where they explored all of their world, they formed a community, they were unified from the start, there was never anything like what Earth has, with multiple governments, the only time they had something like that was when they were isolated by land and unable to communicate. Not that they didn’t fight amongst themselves they did, but it rarely came to bloodshed and when it did it was quickly resolved, they had small infightings, nothing on our all-out world war scale. So they felt no need to change for extended periods of time, they were safe from the environment, nature and other life on their worlds. When they did change it was to make their lives better. Their medical technology is leagues ahead of ours from what we had read in the databases, since the ship had no medical capabilities. When they went in space it was because their populations had finally exceeded their world’s limits. One other reason for the time it took them to reach this point is that they mostly reproduced a lot slower than us. There were a few races that reproduced as fast or faster than we do, and those were generally younger races, so there is something there as well. When they met other races there were wars between them, but rarely, and those were again periods where their technology seemed to leap ahead again. But again wars were quickly resolved since trade was much more profitable for both sides. There was one warlike race in the vicinity of one of the founding members of the Union territory, they started to conquer planets from other races, and it was this event that pushed the other races to form the Union. The race that attacked was called Minoolos by the Union, though their real name was unpronounceable by most other races so they made their own name, it means “those who destroy”, and the race was actually a lot younger than most of Union races, it had already been warring in space for hundreds of years before coming upon the Union territory. They were only slightly more advanced than the Union races and were attacking multiple races at the same time. Until the Unuura called for an alliance that later became the Union. The attacked races shared technology, and researched new technologies in order to defend themselves, and they had a lot more manpower between themselves than the Minoolos had. And as soon as they closed the technology gap they pushed them back and reclaimed their worlds. They formed the Union and started expanding their territory, they even accepted the Minoolos into the Union later. In time the Union became an enormous behemoth with spherical territory of more than 700 light years in radius, with many thin finger like extensions from the center, and as such were not a soft target for warlike races. And with that safety in numbers there again came a period of little technological advancement. They didn’t have competition, they traded between themselves and outside races. There were new technologies introduced from time to time by trading or inclusion of other races into the Union, but nothing really age changing. And then we come to the reason why this scout ship was here.”
“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.”