He had to go back a long time to find information about deist beliefs in Priminae culture. By their standards, Earth culture was terribly infantile at barely four thousand years or so of reasonably contiguous written history. The first mention of anything resembling gods was over fifty thousand years before—Priminae years, actually. That worked out to almost seventy thousand, Earth standard.

The Priminae had been a spacefaring culture when humans had first begun domesticating dogs and long before anyone had started the basics of agriculture.

What bothered Eric, from all that, was that they didn’t have any prehistoric records for themselves.

According to these files, the Priminae may as well have sprung fully formed from the ether. No early history, no sign of any sciences before their current level . . . and that is practically obscene.

“How the hell does that happen?” he murmured, shaking his head.

“Pardon me, sir?”

Eric looked up, noting that Miram was looking at him with intense curiosity in her eyes, though the rest of her features remained unchanged. He pursed his lips, considering her for a moment, thinking about what he’d been reading.

“Tell me, Commander, what did you do before your commission was reactivated?”

“Astrometric analysis, Captain. Why?”

“What was that, exactly?”

“Many things, especially as your mission opened up the frontier,” Miram responded. “Mapping stellar anomalies, mostly, looking for signs of stellar civilizations . . .”

“SETI work?”

“Similar,” she answered. “Better funded, particularly since you contacted the Priminae.”

“So you know the Kardashev scale?”

“Of course. It’s required reading,” she said. “Some consider the measure somewhat outdated, but it is still in many ways the benchmark for stellar civilization.”

“Where do you put Earth?”

“Late Type Zero, Early Type One,” she answered instantly. “Depends how you calculate the power expenditures mostly. That’s pre-Drasin. Post-Drasin . . . Captain, this ship alone qualifies as a Type One civilization.”

Eric nodded slowly, thinking about Miram’s statement. He’d actually known what she’d just conveyed, but he hadn’t really parsed the information that way. The Odysseus had more power output than the entire Earth could produce, potentially at least.

“Alright, what about the Priminae?” he asked.

“Mid Type One,” she answered, again without hesitation.

That had been the subject of many debates before she’d reactivated her commission.

“So tell me something. How does a civilization reach Mid Type One without developing fire? Without figuring out electricity?”

“What, sir?” Miram frowned. “It doesn’t.”

“That’s not what I’m seeing here,” Eric said, shifting his screen so she could see it. “I’m looking through the Priminae cultural database. I can’t find a reference to them discovering fire, not even archeological theories. No history of them figuring out electricity, magnetism, or any of the basic sciences.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” Miram looked down to her own screen and started entering search requests.

Eric waited.