0 BBT
United Empire of Denvaria, Interstellar Space
7.34 Light Years from the Starton System
Tough the ship is nearly invisible within its bubble of warped space, the space-time disturbance the Rhemelkhev creates while travelling is visible when passing in front of celestial bodies, such as this yellow dwarf star.
The Rhemelkhev, a powerful coempireal starship, had been travelling through deep interstellar space in HyperBrane Insertion on a direct trajectory towards Starton, the capital of the United Empire of Denvaria. The starship was being guided by A Field of Eastern Flowers, a class-3 hyperAI sent as an ambassador and official representative of the Confluence: after observing this ardently isolationist empire grow for centuries, the Sequence had decided that Denvaria would be one of the first civilizations that the COE would contact and reach, now that they would again begin to interact with the rest of the galaxy.
Denvaria in particular was chosen for a variety of reasons.
Firstly, the Denvarian Empire was mainly composed of humans and human-like aliens which, given the fact that the Terrakin were one of the three main groups of the Confluence, would probably be relatively less complicated to interact with compared to other, more exotic xenosophonts. These humans would also provide an effective new reference base for future interactions with the other humans and human-descendants spread throughout most of the Sector: after all, in the Modern Era âhumanityâ had long been surpassed as a concept.
As for the second reason, while analyzing the data e had received from the Kustannuksan colony ships from Pacifica that arrived in the Confluence millennia ago (discovering that there were humans not from Sol shook coempireal researchers quite a bit, especially the Terrakin ones), e noticed that the UED matched in name with another nation present on the planet, the Kingdom of Emerald Denver. This correspondance itself would have already been far too statistically unlikely for em to not speculate a direct connection, but after discovering that Denvaria was also populated by baseline humans, and that both flags contained similar symbols and colors, the connection between them was more than evident. Thanks to the considerable amount of socio-cultural information the Confluence possessed about Pacifica obtained through the Kustannuksans, interactions with Denvaria would most likely have a more positive outcome. Additionally, the United Empire would probably provide important data to discover more about Pacificaâs star system.
Obviously, A Field of Eastern Flowers was well aware that the Denvariansâ cultural attitudes and tendencies were far less⌠ideal than e would have hoped for. Their xenophobia, militarism and isolationism would considerably increase the chances of them simply attacking the Rhemelkhev on sight and refusing to communicate which, together with their deep distrust of artificial intelligence, made contact with them quite complicated. Even still, ey hoped for the best. Despite eir ship being very heavily armored and protected, and despite the fact that ey were only present in the vessel through an interior communication wormhole, the vast ambassadorial AI still did not want to further fuel the Denvariansâ bad inclinations, and disliked the thought of having to fire back at any attacker.
Now only a little over seven lightyears distant, after months of travel the Rhemelkhev would reach the edge of Startonâs star system in mere minutes. After millennia of isolation and observation, it was time to reach for the rest of the galaxy.
