“They’re called Ni’vo’tu,” Azoro said, appearing in his mind in the same familiar Zen’zat armor as if he was standing in the same room in front of Paul. “The Saiolum is about harmony, and combat disrupts this like you dragging your hand from the air into the water, with bubbles being dragged along. Those bubbles create disruptions that alter the density of the Saiolum, and when it rebalances you additional ripples.”
“Can it be used to shake tendrils?” Paul suspected.
“Your curiosity serves you well. Yes it can, but the greatest strength of the Saiolum is knowledge and connection. Wisdom rather than firepower. It is what binds the galaxies together, and the more life there is there is more Saiolum. Death is its enemy, not a counterbalance. This is why my race did not like warfare, though sometimes it is necessary to fight and kill to prevent mass death as a result of inaction.”
“Kill one to save a million?”
“In some cases, though I know you do not agree with this.”
“If the Life Springs will just create more, what is your obsession with maximizing life production?”
The Zen’zat visibly shrugged. “Habit. Culture. Ritual. We were taught to grow the Saiolum whenever we could, and after a while you stop thinking and just do. Perhaps that is one weakness we had that Star Force does not, but we do not apologize for protecting life.”
“Nor do I apologize for not betraying an individual to save others. Better to have a thousand die to an enemy than one die to a friend.”
“A source of your unity, perhaps, though not mathematically wise.”
“Sacrifice is at the heart of the darkside, Azoro. And it seems to run counter to the Saiolum as well.”
“It does, but we are not of it…well, aside from the Ju’en’xa…but we are so few that it does not speak accurately of our race. We would walk in the dark places to protect the light, and in some cases do unsavory things to protect others. You have a different methodology, and one that appears to be naïve, yet it has served you well. I hope it continues to.”
“Did yours?”
“Ultimately no, but I cannot see how adopting your methodology would have saved us.”
“You gotta give me something. You know my mind is strategic. How did they take you down?”
The Zen’zat knelt, standing on his tiptoes as his knees rose almost to his chest and he placed one hand on the floor and spun his extended fingers in a circle…with Paul’s head immediately starting to hurt, but the image of a cloud with dots in it was of more interest to him, for this was the first time Azoro had shown him something he hadn’t seen before.
“The others do not matter for now, but you are facing the Hadarak. Within the Saiolum they are strong, though they do not know it. We could see everywhere in their domain when we got past their front lines to their heavily populated worlds, and we learned much even before I was marooned and went in search of more answers. But the Ni’vo’tu that you have recently discovered also acts as white noise and hides vision unless you know where to look or are very strong. With distance our strength in the Saiolum diminishes, so we could not see what we needed to see then, and it allowed them to gain an advantage on us that others exploited, especially in the latter days.”
“Which was?”
The dots in the cloud moved, as did the pain in Paul’s head, but he didn’t see any particular pattern he recognized.
“We do not like killing, but defending against the Hadarak requires much of it. Too much for our civilization to be good at, so we were always looking for weak points that we could strike to stem the flow, or cripple their ability to get to us. We were desperate for a way to fight them without having to resort to the same level of butchery that they employ, for we did not want to lose ourselves only to live on as drained corpses. Betrayal of life should only be done selectively, and rarely, not on an industrial scale.”
“Or not at all.”
“Preferably,” Azoro half agreed, “but the weak points in the Hadarak we never found, for they do not exist. At least, not as we were searching for. Do you see anything before you worth the pain I am inducing?”
“Nothing,” Paul admitted.
The Zen’zat nodded. “Now add in us,” he said, with a sprinkling of little specs of light amongst the dark dots.
“Us as in…?”
“The weak point in our civilization. The Sha’kier relied on the Ju’en’xa, who could not die, yet the Hadarak could kill us.”
The image of the cloud and the dots changed, with a swath of the dots winking out, and with it the cloud around them disappeared…followed shortly by the lights inside it.
“They have a self-death protocol, don’t they?” Paul asked, suddenly understanding.
“Yes they do, to diminish their numbers in the conquered systems in order to avoid drawing the Apocalypse Monsters…or so the Neofan told you. This isn’t entirely untrue, but the Hadarak did not only employ it in these areas. They also used it in the contested ones when they identified the position of one of us. If we were blockaded in a stronghold they could not easily take, they would take all the surrounding systems and mass produce population in them, creating an outflow of Saiolum, then they would grind the stronghold down until all were dead except them.”
“Then in unison they would all die,” Paul guessed.
“Not just in the one system, but all the surrounding ones. The death ripples would
