This wasn’t the first time Caldenia and I had clashed over politics. I had seen a lot of the galaxy, and I’d witnessed the kind of horrors a tyrannical government brought. I would take chaos and freedom over stable shackles any day. Yes, it was messy and inefficient at times, but I could vote, I could run for office, I could criticize our government without fear of persecution, and that was priceless.

Caldenia shrugged. “As paradoxical as it is, authoritarian displays tend to stabilize the public. The citizens find a strong, frightening leader reassuring. The tyrant is a monster, but it is their monster, and they take pride in their power.”

“To be fair, the Supremacy practices a limited tyranny. The Parliament of the Supremacy is also an elected body,” Kosandion told me. “Sometimes they murder incompetent tyrants.”

Caldenia shrugged. “Well, one has to throw the rabble a bone, Dina.”

This was the strangest conversation. They were both talking to me without acknowledging the other person existed.

Resven returned and brought two people with him. They weren’t the same as the two who left. It must’ve been a team swap. We had given Resven, Miralitt, and Orata a lot of autonomy when it came to their own people, because they changed their staff depending on the situation, and none of us had time to approve every personnel member they brought over. We’d asked them to keep their personal team at three members or less.

“The ruling families of the Dominion and the Supremacy grew apart over the many centuries,” Kosandion said, “Yet each followed a similar method of selecting their rulers. At first, it was calculated marriages and natural birth, then a ruler with multiple partners and many children in hopes that one would prove suitable to govern, and finally genetic modification. A single heir bioengineered to lead the state and its people.”

Of which both people in front of me were prime examples.

“A century and a half ago, there was a biological attack on the Dominion’s ruling family,” Kosandion said.

Caldenia gave him a sharp look.

“The perpetrators were found and eliminated, but the damage had been done. A vicious hereditary disease ravaged the bloodline, threatening to permanently end generations of careful genetic selection. It wiped out three quarters of the family. For thirty years the ruling family struggled to carve it out of their genetic code, but it came back again and again. It killed the children and destroyed hundreds of embryos in the natural and artificial wombs.”

I had never heard of that. It was not in any of the Dominion or Supremacy documents.