While I continued my search for the artifacts, I was eventually forced to turn my attention back to the bio-tech aliens. At first, I had decided to just ignore them, but they were expanding at such a rate that they were rapidly enclosing on my territories, and somehow, they wlthey had a large enough number of civilians to quickly colonize every world they took. These facts alone were enough to start worrying me, but I was still willing to give them some distance, if only because I did not want to come into conflict with them.

Needless to say, that failed.

Approximately two weeks after I obtained my first Artifact from this universe, one of the new aliens' ships showed up in one of the systems I'd marked for colonizing. Already, I'd deployed fabbers in orbit and on the world's surface to begin setting up shop. I was just startibeg to move my forces in to drive them off when the ship promptly opened fire on my fabbers and managed, much to my surprise, to destroy them with ease. It then deployed squid like drones to the planet's surface, which promptly began destroying my planetary fabbers. Once they had completed their mission, they self destructed into a mess of body parts and body fluids, while the ship promptly bailed out of the system.

Seriously? What the hell was that? What had I done to them? what was their - why am I getting a new alert?

...THERE'S MORE OF THEM?! AND THEY ARE ATTACKING MY OTHER SYSTEMS!? WTF!?

I lost control of six systems because of these unknown aliens, and to add insult to injury, by the time. I'd pulled in new fabbers to replace the ones that had been destroyed, those aliens had set up colonies on the very planets they'd taken from me. They also made a point of regularly harassing my patrols, but strangely, whenever they came upon one of the system's my creation's had settled, they just left.

Alright, time for payback.

I quickly made a few fleets, loaded them up with Tripp's, then sent them toward systems the aliens had just conquered and waited for them to reach their destinations. Once they arrived, I scanned those systems for life signs matching those of the aliens, trying to see if there were any civilians in this system. They had the courtesy to avoid attacking any inhabited systems that belonged to me, so I would show them that same courtesy.

On the ones that weren't inhabited, I sent my forces out to begin evicting my neighbors from the premises. Construction units were obliterated, as were strange organic factories that built them. I even took direct control of a Dragoon Hovertabk just so that I could personally smoke some of the beasts. Idly, I noted that these forces seemed to have a similar composition to my own, albeit organic rather than biological. Fabbers for land, sea, air, infantry (equivalent to robot), and orbital were all present, as were factories. There were even organic variations of extractors and power generators.

...Oh hell, did Melissa send in another Commander to mess with me? One that had some kind of organic techbase?

Well, there was only one way to find out.

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Careful examination of the galactic news networks confirmed that these aliens did have a name for their civilization: the Empyrean Illuminate. Supposedly, they were a coalition of species that evolved on a single world, who had ultimately united to expand beyond their homeworld. Supposedly, their advanced biotechnology was the result of reverse engineering Armor artifacts on their homeworld. A load of crap, if you asked me.

For all there advanced tech, though, these aliens still had one weakness - their cyber security wasn't too much better than the standard for this universe, so it wasn't too hard to hack into their computing network. Now I was doubting they were a type of commander - didn't we all have advanced cyber warfare suites? Anyway, once I was in their network, I spent some time sitting through their huge internet equivalent (which wasn't really that different from the one at home. Ugh, no water what species they were, peole still had dirty minds) for juicy bits of information. Names of important officials, weapons tech, the like - wait, is that email address equivalent of their leader? Apparently said leader was called the high sovereign, which was the only thing known about them - not even their gender was public knowledge.

Perhaps I could use this to settle things peacefully? And give them an epic verbal dressing down.

I quickly sent a message to the High Sovereign, asking them if I could arrange a meeting with them to talk about their recent transgressions with my forces. Once the initial surprise of me contacting them wore off, they agreed to speak with me, thoug they requested it be done at a system unaffiliated with either of us. I acquiesced with those terms, though I did inform them that I would be calling in a fleet of my own as security for the meeting. I was unsurprised that they demanded they also wanted a fleet of their own on standby in case things went wrong. I'd have been surprised if they didn't ask for a fleet in order to protect their leader.

I was about to leave them to be when I realized that ourbplanned meeting wasn't exactly going to be a secret. We were moving in entire fleets to keep us safe at our negotiations, and people would notice that. Inevitably, people were going to ask questions about what was going on, and that could be problematic in the future. So, after asking the Sovereign if they'd be okay with it, I contacted the heads of state of the Terrans and their allies and informed them of exactly what we were planning to do at that planet, and pleaded them to limit the amount of news coverage for the event. I honestly didn't expect them to stop all news coverage of the event (and frankly I didn't want that anyway), I just didn't want reporters to muck things up for the two of us.

With that settled, I readied for the coming meeting. It would happen one week from today, and hopefully, it would go peacefully.

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As all of you can probably guess, it didn't go peacefully. How it actually proceeded, though, really wasn't something I expected.

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AN: Read and Review! This is Flameal15k, signing off!