“The Ushin were also selected to be purged by the Phage,” Marcum said. “They almost succeeded, but the Phage had to pull resources to deal with a new threat that ended up being a bigger pain in the ass than they thought.”

“Us,” Celesta said.

“Us,” Marcum nodded. “The fight we put up during that war caused the Phage to temporarily abandon the Ushin, likely with the intent of crushing us in a blitz and then moving back to finish them. Thanks to Wolfe and Blake getting to the core mind that never happened.

“So … that brings me to another interesting, highly classified bit of information. We didn’t stumble across the Ushin, they came to us. They’ve known about us since we started pushing our borders out, but our environmental preferences are so different we weren’t going to be competing for the same habitable planets, so they ignored us. The remaining Ushin know that we killed the Phage off for good and they want to repay us in some way, so they tracked our automated survey drones and waited for a crewed mission to show up to one of their planets.”

“What can they offer?” Pitt asked, leaning forward.

“No idea,” Marcum shrugged. “We have petabytes of data from the first contact team, and I can’t make heads or tails of any of it. They appear to be much more technologically advanced than us, but from what I can tell they don’t have shit for weaponry. Talking to the ambassador’s team, I get the impression two-way communication between us is still very clunky and it’ll be some time before high-level concepts can be discussed.”

“Fair enough.” Pitt leaned back on the couch. “So who are the Darshik?”

“They’re the other side of the coin,” Marcum said, flipping through some notes on his tile. “Ah, there we go. Okay, so the Darshik controlled six or ten star systems—you see what I mean about communication being tough—that butted up against what the Ushin recognized as their outer boundary. The Phage found them and began sterilizing their worlds before, inexplicably, they stopped. Two planets were spared: their homeworld and a second habitable colony world in the same system. This is where it gets a little muddy, but apparently the Phage issued the same ‘test’ and the results were different, thus the species was spared.

“The damage to the Darshik collective psyche, however, didn’t fare so well. They became isolationists and then they began a sort of quasi-worship of the Phage, apparently convinced the fuckers were actually protecting them, if you can believe that.”

“And then along comes humanity and kills their idol?” Celesta guessed.

“We’re not sure of the timeline but that’s our assumption,” Marcum nodded. “It raises some disturbing questions, however. Like how did they know where the core mind was located, and how did they know where we were located?”