They had deliberately separated him and Nico from the rest of the fight, but it looked like they weren't going to send anything out.
"Did they seriously just cock block me?" Nico demanded over the radio, and Max sensed Sergeant Khalil's laughter.
"It looks like it. That shield is as thick as the one on their Colony Ship. Unless we go overboard with the Antimatter Torpedoes, it looks like they just intend to keep us from fighting." Max agreed.
"What the feth is the point of that? If they're trying to wipe out everything, shouldn't they be doing their best to kill us as well?" Khalil demanded.
He was a soldier and a proud one. It did not sit well for him to be separated from a battle like this and watch on the sensors as others fought and died. That wasn't how it was supposed to go. He should be there on the lines with them.
They weren't his people, but they were soldiers, just like he was, and a little thing like a chitinous shell wouldn't affect his respect for their goal of defending their home.
Max sat in silence as the thoughts of the Arisen hit him. In combat, the thoughts were all combat, but being within a hundred kilometres of an Arisen Cube, he could sense much more than just the desire to destroy.
There was a purpose to their rampant violence. They believed that they were preparing the region for a final battle. The end of times, when only the worthiest of species could possibly survive, and the weak would be a burden that would drag the entire sector to its death.
What Max couldn't understand was what sort of threat they thought they were going to be facing that demanded they eliminate the vast majority of the species in the region in order to survive.
The logic made sense to him in a brutal and primal way. Only the strong survive, and the bonds to the weakest pack members pull the entire pack down together. Once the weakest are dead, the pack is stronger and more able to respond to threats.
Max wasn't sure that even the more advanced levels of his Innate Talent would allow him to communicate with the Arisen over these distances. The only species that he could freely communicate with were the Illithid, who could read his thoughts, and Nico, who he could just send digital messages directly as answers to her thoughts.
They had intercepted messages from the Arisen, though, so they knew the frequency, if not the encryption codes, of their transmissions, and Max knew their thoughts. He hadn't mastered their language, but his System Function gave him a good general impression of their intentions, as some things didn't need language to be conveyed.
So, he sent them a message that he hoped expressed confusion and waited to see what the Cube's occupants would think of it.
They didn't really understand his message since it was such a simple thing without context, but after a moment, the thoughts on the ship began to form a picture that Max could understand. It wasn't really a response but more of a memory.
A memory of a war that never ended. Of beings from the Ancient Past that used them and the Knife Ears as pawns and of a battle between those beings that had destroyed a million stars with their ferocity.
That was where they were now, Max realized. This entire region was the slowly reforming remnants of the battlefield between the beings which had once ruled over them and the Knife Ears.
Max thought back to his past life and the battles against the Darklings, which he was certain were the species known as the Knife Ears in this region. They had fought constantly as well, but there hadn't been such a huge battle.
At least not that he knew of.
It might have happened after he died, or perhaps it was simply too far away since there was no spatial reference in the minds of the Arisen.
He didn't know how long he had been dead, but if the process of his resurrection had been something as simple as his soul transferring across the Universe looking for a suitable host at the speed of light, it could have been millions or tens of millions of years to get to where he was reborn.
So much could have happened over that time. Even the Grand Protectorate could have fallen into obscurity and oblivion over that much time.
So, he sent them another message, a description of the world that he recalled living on in his past life, the Capital Planet of the Protectorate, where he was brought out of retirement only for parades and holidays, reminding the citizens of the glory days and that they still had a hero among them who would step up to fight on their behalf even a thousand years later.
This time, they did understand, but they thought the humans were here looking for that place. The wave of panic and nostalgia that followed nearly overwhelmed Max with its intensity. They didn't recall a Protectorate as he knew it, but they knew the planet.
Their memories showed Max where they had learned his combat skills as well. They had taken the planet as a place of refuge in their eternal war with the Darklings. The planet was already abandoned and in ruins, but the buildings had been designed to be eternal, and the Capital Building was still standing.
They had accessed the logs on the computers there, intended for training children. It was all that could be salvaged of the knowledge on the planet after the planet had been abandoned, but it gave them an edge against the Darklings.
They had fled again after obtaining the knowledge so that the enemy wouldn't know that they had been on the planet, but that was all that Max could glean from the Arisen force, and it was all remembered as a legend passed down to children. A fable about a turning point in the eternal war, a moment when they had briefly held the upper hand.
[Nico, I think I know where we used to live. It should be somewhere near this region, and I'm afraid that it might not exist anymore. Their thoughts say that a battle between mighty alien beings destroyed a million star systems and created this region, and they got the fighting style they use from the abandoned ruins of my old homeworld. I'm not confident that the two overlap, but it is a possibility.] He told her sadly.
It wasn't like his past life actually mattered, but he had hoped for a better answer to his curiosity than that it had been lost as collateral damage in a battle that had raged for all of known history.
It also left him with one more question. Who were the Arisen, and how much had they changed that he couldn't recognize them anymore, even with the memories of his past life?
Could they really be an AI run amok or a spiritual species of some sort that wasn't collected in his memories? He remembered a lot, but there were also a lot of things that he never knew to start with since he was either at war or sheltered on a Shrine World.
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