Max opened the message and went straight to the personal message from Ranarth. The information from the ancient records that he had dug up could wait until the urgent part of the communication was over.
[Commanders, I have located the missing Cathedral Ship fleets. Or at least some of them.
They have gathered outside the Alliance territory, using the fact that the other layers are dead in this region as a way to hide from detection by my people. We can't sneak up on them through the sub layers here, so they have gathered in the vast expanse, a region where there are no stars, much less any inhabited worlds, to stage for what I can only assume is an attack.
How they got there is not yet clear, and with their limited Warp Speed capability, it will take nearly a week for them to get to the Alliance once they start moving.
They are not in the same direction as your exploration vessel, rest assured they should be safe for the moment, but the Alliance and the humans' galaxy will be hit very nearly the same time. I have put a map in this communication, as well as the details of how we learned of the Great Enemy's presence.
Additionally, I have included a large amount of new information that was sent to me on ancient human manufacturing techniques. I have shared this with the man known as Uncle Lu as well, but it should prove essential to your efforts to expand your fleet using new technologies.
Best of luck.]
Max shared a concerned look with Nico, and opened the attached file, detailing the Great Enemy's presence outside the Anomaly Region, and noticed the headline.
[Data gathered after analysis of suspicious signal from within Alliance Territory.]
The thought that there might have been embedded moles within the Alliance, despite the fact that they hadn't been anywhere near the fighting during the last rounds of battle, was deeply concerning, and the information that they had only identified the source of the signal down to a star system with three inhabited planets and a few asteroid mining colonies that turned out cheap goods for trade.
The system was an independent colony within the Alliance, it didn't belong to any particular species or their Empires, and the governing body was locally voted upon. There wasn't a large group that immediately stood out to Max as the likely culprits, but that also meant it could have been an implanted cultist, if some of the enemy ships had escaped through the Anomaly the Hunters were guarding before it had been closed.
In fact, it was possible that this whole fleet had been waiting the whole time, and they had only just now detected them, thanks to an intercepted signal.
It was a nightmare in the making, and the Alliance wasn't prepared to take on any sort of invasion fleet, much less the Cathedral Ships. But the most important question was how they had gotten there.
Was there an Anomaly out there somewhere? Had they come from the other side of the expanse? If the Anomaly Region was actually on the other side of that, outside the range of their sensors or blocked from view, it was possible that they had actually gone as far as they could in the other layers and then came out where they were now to wait.
Nico had already forwarded the message through a direct transfer to the communications devices of the Envoys here aboard Absolution so that they could get up to speed on the threat to the Alliance before any attacks occurred, but they would need time to verify it with their own sensors, so Max turned his attention to the other data.
What he found was a museum worthy treasure trove of information on ancient humanity. Though, considering the source, it could very well have come from a museum, where it was long since forgotten and tucked into a disused file server.
It was mostly mundane things, random bits of technology that the researcher had found interesting about human culture, as well as some common items that were used daily. Max got the feeling that this collection was supposed to be something of a "Day in the Life" sort of exhibit, but it was proving to be quite enlightening to see how they had solved various engineering issues in the past, even if their technology was very different to what he was used to in this life.
The more he saw of it, the more hidden memories from his past life it triggered, which helped him understand the ancient technologies that he recognized, but he also quickly realized that the Darklings had no sense of time.
Some of these items that they had lumped together were tens of thousands of years apart in development and use. They had virtually nothing at all in common, not even the power supply that fed them was compatible. The humans simply evolved and adapted too quickly for the Darklings record keeping to sort out.
But it was the thought that counted, and once they finished with the more pressing issues, Max would be sure to get back to this massive trove of data to try to adapt more goodies from it to their current lineup.
"Did you find anything good?" Max called over to Nico once he decided that the data could wait for later.
"A few things, but nothing all that revolutionary. There's too much to really go through it all at once, and it's not sorted in any sort of logical order. They numbered it by the order that it arrived at their facility, when the previous facility was decommissioned."
The researchers looked like they might cry at that news. They took record keeping very seriously, and the mere thought of just organizing random data by the order that the data packets arrived was something close to blasphemy in their eyes.
"Don't worry, we will let you fix the records when you have some spare time. Just pick an organizational method before you start." Max assured them.
"Thanks? I mean, yes, we really don't want the data to stay that way, but can we volunteer someone else to do it?" One of the Innu replied.
"Yeah, like one of the Giants." Another agreed.
Max chuckled and smiled at them.
"If you can con one into doing it, feel free."
