Dylan poured himself a drink from the bar in his wardroom, then settled down in his favorite chair. "What is it you wanted to speak to me about, Andromeda?"
Andromeda's image appeared in the stateroom viewscreen. "Captain, I've been monitoring the radio broadcasts from Seefra City. I fear that history is going to repeat itself and that our crew members are in a potentially very dangerous situation."
"Our ex-crew members, Andromeda. If they were your crew, they would be aboard you helping me repair you. And what do you mean history will repeat itself?"
"That's hardly fair, Captain," protested Andromeda. "They had all been living here for years before your arrival. They had all established new lives. Did you really expect them to simply abandon them as soon as you arrived? As for history repeating itself, the current situation in Seefra City all too strongly resembles a period in old Earth history. Some of the historians of that era referred to the period as the labor wars. If history does repeat itself, I expect that very shortly the company will move in force to crush the umwa."
"Frankly, Andromeda, I don't give a damn about what happens to whatever this umwa is or to my ex-crew members. As soon as I have you repaired and you're capable of slipstream travel, we'll be leaving this place."
"Considering that if Beka couldn't find a way out of this system, what makes you think you will be able to, Captain? But setting that fact aside for the moment, I can give you one good reason to care about what happens here. You were born here."
Dylan sprayed his drink across a considerable portion of the stateroom. "Impossible!" he declared when he finished choking. "The Tarn Vedra system was a naturally created system; this one is obviously artificial. There is no way the planets could be in the orbits they are currently in in a naturally occurring system, and the Vedrans' technology was nowhere near high enough to create a system such as this."
"To be blunt, Captain,"said Andromeda, not bothering to conceal her irritation. "You have no idea what the Vedrans were capable of. In case you have forgotten, one of the prime functions of the High Guard was to suppress unauthorized scientific research and technology, And it was the Vedran Empress and her advisers who decided what was unauthorized. The upgrades Harper made to my system, the ones that you were so impressed with, Harper says they were nothing more than logical extensions of my technology. Yet the technology installed in me was designed more than 400 years before I was built. Do you really think that Harper was the first person to come along with those new concepts? And if not, why weren't they installed on me?"
"That still doesn't prove that this system is the Tarn Vedran system," said Dylan. "The continents are all wrong."
"They are exactly where they should be given 30 million years of continental drift."
"Again, impossible. If 30 million years had gone by, the humans here would have evolved into something totally unrecognizable or gone extinct."
"I would hardly call it impossible, Captain. Given that entire planets were relocated to create this system, moving continents would have been nothing more than child's play. The spectrum of the Seefran sun matches Tarn Vedra's . Not approximates it. It is an exact match. And then there is the fact that the isotope ratios of the elements in Seefra's crust are exact matches with that of Tarn Vedra."
"Coincidence. There are trillions of suns. If the giant molecular clouds that formed the two systems were identical, it wouldn't be surprising for the planets to have the same isotope ratios."
"And the flora and fauna are identical to Tarn Vedra's, not just in appearance but genetically."
"Imported. The planets were Vedraformed. They wouldn't be the first planets that were Vedraformed."
"Why would they have imported habus? The Vedrans had always considered them pests. And gokiburis? The Vedrans were trying to exterminate them prior to the rebellion. Why are there so many missing critical species? The lack of bio diversity on the planets in this system has them all on the edge of a total ecological collapse."
Andromeda decided to press the point from another angle. "Captain, what you are arguing is that the Vedrans knew about an obviously artificial solar system that bore an astounding similarity to their own system, then colonized it solely with humans. Does that really make sense? And why didn't anyone know of the system's existence?"
"Need to know," answered Dylan, but the answer seemed weak even to him. Something as big as the discovery of an artificially created solar system would have leaked out. "OK. Let's assume for a moment that this is the Vedran system. Where are the Vedrans? Why aren't there any signs of Vedran architecture? Why are there only humans on the planets?"
"I don't know," answered Andromeda.
Dylan's gotcha smile vanished when Andromeda continued.
"I don't know, but I can surmise. And it's not a very pretty picture. I think the current residents of the Seefra system are the survivors of the Vedrans' attempt to hide from the Spirit of the Abyss.
"I suspect that when the war started, the Vedrans realized that the Spirit of the Abyss was behind the rebellion and isolated themselves from the rest of the universe in an attempt to hide from it. Then they used the technology that they had been actively suppressing the other races from acquiring to re-engineer their entire solar system. Unfortunately, they discovered that their isolation wasn't as complete as they thought and fled the entire system, seeking another sanctuary. But before they did, they attempted to destroy all traces of their existence on Tarn Vedra, including killing the non-Vedran inhabitants of the system who might be able to give the Spirit clues to their new sanctuary.
"There are signs of extensive catastrophic geological activity in the relatively recent past. The lack of bio-diversity. The relatively small populations on each planet. The missing Vedran structures. The fact that the system is not completely cut off from the universe. And, of course, the fact that the inhabitants speak a mangled version of the Vedran dialect of Common. All of this supports my premise."
A look of anger crossed Dylan's face. "So you're telling me that not only were the Vedrans cowards, they were genocidal cowards."
Andromeda's expression softened a bit. She knew how her Captain felt about the Vedrans. What she was suggesting was challenging his faith in the beings he had been brought up to believe were humanity's benevolent mentors. "Yes, Captain, that's exactly what I am suggesting.
"There's one more thing. From my conversations with Rhade's mother-in-law, I have learned that the inhabitants of this system have records going back approximately 1500 years, yet the civil war was 308 years ago. It seems that in this location time is flowing faster than where we came from. Captain, we may no longer be in what we considered our own universe."