Varis did the same thing I'd been doing: looking up at the ceiling. Studying it rather intently, I might add. Like there was something very interesting up there.

I looked up as well. It was a swirling pattern of tiles that were made to look like the galaxy. We're talking what the galaxy actually looked like now that we'd been able to send some scout craft far out into the distance between the galaxies to actually get a look at the whole damn thing.

We hadn't traveled very far past our own spiral arm, but that was more a function of us bumping up against the livisk the last time we tried to expand. Which had humanity a little more conservative about just going up into the stars.

There was always the possibility we might run into something else out there. We'd heard rumors of other civilizations. We'd seen remnants of civilizations that had annihilated themselves in nuclear fire because they weren't able to pass the great filter test.

But this sounded even more interesting than all of that.

Varis sighed. She turned to look at me, and then she gestured to Arvie.

And I was surprised to see Sagittarius suddenly lighting up in those tiles. For a brief and terrified moment, I thought maybe the great black hole was actually coming to life and it was going to swallow us all. It was about as rational as a little kid refusing to get into a swimming pool because they were afraid Bruce the shark was going to eat them, which had turned out to be a surprisingly persistent fear.

Nobody ever said that fear has to be a rational thing.

The light in Sagittarius turned out to be a projector that shot out into the middle of the room, and it was a map of the galaxy in three dimensions. Like in the holoblock I missed from the Allamaraine, or even Early Warning 72.

I never thought I'd see the day when I missed anything from Early Warning 72, but here we were.

"No doubt you've always wondered why it is that a star empire the size of the Livisk Ascendancy is having so much trouble fighting off a relative upstart on the galactic scene like humanity," she said.

I grinned when I looked at her. She sounded so confident in the Livisk Ascendancy's ability to brush us aside. Like there had to be some other explanation as to why they hadn't been able to do that just yet.

"I thought it was because we were better at fighting than you are," I said.

"Excuse me?" she said with a sniff.

"Oh, come on," I said, rolling my eyes as I stared at the hologram of the galaxy. I figured I was on the verge of learning something very interesting about the galaxy and what the livisk had been dealing with out there that wasn't humanity, but I also couldn't help but get in a little dig at the vaunted Livisk Ascendancy.

"Ever since I came to this world, I've been kicking your ass left and right, and I don't think it's because I have any particular skill that makes me a better warrior than any of the livisk."

There was a pause, and then finally Arvie spoke up.

"He does have a point, General."

"He doesn't have a point," she said with a sniff.

"He has been able to out-fly, out-maneuver, and out-fight quite a few livisk who have tried to kill him. At first I thought it was simply luck, but now I'm starting to think there might be something more to it."

"Thank you for the vote of confidence, Arvie," I said, grinning and looking up at the projector since there was no other representation of the artificial intelligence in the room.

"Be that as it may," she said. "That doesn't mean humanity is better at waging war than we are. One of our warriors…"

"…is worth at least a few Terran fighters," I said with a shrug. "I'll admit there's a reason why we always use power armor when we're going up against your warriors, but you'll notice that you have a much larger empire than humanity could ever hope to achieve, for all that we've been busy terraforming a lot of worlds. Something you don't seem to be fans of."

"No point in terraforming a world when you have plenty of habitable worlds in your large empire to begin with."

"Sometimes it's not the size that counts," I retorted. "It's what you do with it."

She blinked. "What does that even mean?"

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"I believe it's a joke the humans have that relates to the size of their reproductive organs."

"Anyway," I said, grinning at her. "Humanity has been punching above their weight class for some time now. Even with all the advantages your civilization supposedly has over us. Even with the fact that you've somehow managed to have a far wider ranging star empire than what we have. And I think it's because the nature of your political system is fundamentally unstable."

I really wanted to know the secret they were talking about, but I was also getting going and couldn't stop.

I wondered if I should even get into this at all. It was getting into some of the planning I'd been doing with the Arvie shard in my man cave. The kind of thing I didn't really want to bring up until I was absolutely certain I could start making some of the moves that would allow me to eventually put an end to the empress and hopefully, the Livisk Ascendancy.

"Our star empire has been going on for thousands of years," she said with a sniff, as though that was the only point that needed to be made. "We've been flying between the stars since your people still thought roaming around on hairy beasts was the height of technology."

"And yet we were still able to fight you to a standstill once we figured out how to reach for the stars and we ran into you assholes waiting for us out there," I said.

There was another pause. Both from Varis and from Arvie. I'd take that as a double score if I was putting things up on the board.

"He does have a point. Again," Arvie said. "I know that a detailed analysis of the fighting between humanity and the livisk is…"

"We don't want to talk about that," Varis said, and her cheeks colored in something that I knew to be anger rather than embarrassment based on the emotion flowing through the link.

"So you're not allowed to actually examine why it is you lost a war," I said. "Do they have propaganda from the empress that says she led everybody to a great victory or something? Only the victories keep getting closer and closer to home?"

Varis looked annoyed. I could feel the annoyance through the link, but there was also something else that was coming through that link. A little bit of acceptance.

"That's the problem with living in an autocracy where everything the big boss says is the absolute truth. It's easy to lose your hold on that autocracy when you get to the point where the lies coming from the autocrat stretch to the breaking point, and with the way your empress runs things, it's pretty fucking easy to see the lies she's putting out into the world stretching."

"It is," Varis finally said.

"So do people actually buy her bullshit, or do they just go along to get along?"

"I'm sure there are some out there who are true believers in the Ascendancy and the empress, and I'm sure there are a large number who never stop to think that the empress would lie to them about anything."

"There are also indications that there are a large number of individuals who are more interested in simply living their lives rather than rocking the boat, to borrow a term of art from humanity," Arvie said.

"Yeah, that sounds about right," I said. "There were a lot of autocrats on ancient Earth, and there were a lot of people who just went along with it because it was easier to go along than it was to try and fight them."

"Is there a point to any of this?" Varis asked, and she sounded a bit snippy.

Though I knew from the link that it was the snippiness of someone who was being forced to confront a part of their world they didn't care for. Like maybe she'd been one of those people who disagreed with the empress and knew she was full of it for quite some time now, but she hadn't actually confronted that internal inconsistency in her thinking.

I sighed. Maybe it was time to confront some of that internal inconsistency in her thinking, even if it could potentially get me close to revealing something she ordered me not to.

"I've been looking at livisk society from the outside for most of my life, and from the funhouse mirror view on the inside for almost a month now," I said. "I've been dealing with the empress trying to kill me. I've been dealing with a whole bunch of lost in translation moments, and it's all coming together to paint a picture."

"And what kind of picture would you say it's painting, Bill?" she asked.

"You have an empress who came to power fairly recently. And you haven't been going out there and conquering territory as a result of her recent rise to power. You have a capital city built on the ruins of other destroyed capital cities. You have reclamation mines you send prisoners to work even though there's no need for you to send prisoners to do that kind of work. The cruelty is the point. But more important than that, you have those reclamation mines in the first place. You're trying to mine materials and technology from other versions of your civilization that went up in atomic fire because you can't stop fighting each other as a method of transferring power from one dynasty to the next."

"You are quite correct in that assessment," Arvie said, which earned me and him a dirty look from Varis.

"What does this have to do with anything?" she asked.

"The empress is in a fundamentally weak position. The entire Livisk Ascendancy is in a fundamentally weak position. If you talked to me maybe two months ago, I wouldn't have given a flying fuck if the Livisk Ascendancy was in a fundamentally weak position that could fuck over the galaxy if it collapsed. That would be a mess that would probably be at least a thousand years in unpacking and humanity would benefit. It would make the Romans falling back on Earth look like a walk in the park. But I wouldn't give a fuck as long as the empress was gone and humanity was left alone."

"Why do I get the feeling your position has changed since then?" Varis asked, arching an eyebrow.

"Because it has," I said. "Because I'm here with you. With Arvie. Because I met Sera. Because I've seen lots of livisk who are caught up in a system that sucks and it's totally fucking them over on a daily basis."

"And humans are better?"

"Humans aren't any better at all," I said. "We've just come up with different ways to fuck each other over. Usually dealing with the movement of credits rather than honor and nobility and militarism and all that bullshit."

"Though you humans are pretty good at the whole militarism thing," Arvie said.

"Thank you for that," I said. "Game recognizes game."

"So what's the point to any of this?"

"The point is you tell me the big secret you have here, probably some other alien species that's fighting you on a different front and keeping you too occupied to crush humanity, and then we figure out a way to sweep all this bullshit with the empress aside and do civilization better."

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