Our worlds have fallen into the hands of little men; the Nemaeans have shown this to me. I cannot say that I am thankful for a chance to meet them, and I cannot say that I like them. I was afraid—once—of what the Nemaeans have become, and now I am more profoundly troubled by what we have ultimately shown ourselves to be. In my own mind’s eye, I saw myself as an accomplished citizen of the Core World communities: the pinnacle of humanity. I patted myself on the back for my petty achievements: the home, the wife (now a stranger) the bank account and Human Resource viability rating. And then, because of my job, I met the Nemaeans. I judged them to be primitive throwbacks to an era in human history best forgotten. And then, I saw their ships; I gawked at their sheer immensity and wondered at what alien mentalities could find a need for such intimidating leviathans. The Nemaeans showed me things I dared not see on my own. They questioned the very meaning of my existence and quietly panicked at the very fact that I even have something so inhuman as a Human Resource viability rating. We met them at a frontier outpost world: a trio of medium cruisers larger than any space station I’ve ever known. Each ship measured a diminutive twelve kilometers from bow to stern, each ship (ranked as a medium cruiser) stood in need of a complicated mass transit system of maglev subways and robot-guided trams. I judged myself proud of Core System achievements, of our sophistication, until I rode a subway on the most common of Nemaean starships…until I learned that each Nemaean starship breeds its own crew. The Nemaeans are alien for many reasons, none-the-least of which is the fact that the concepts of mother and starship are one-in-the-same for at least half-a-billion Nemaean citizens. Their ships are cybernetic organisms: a mother, a pilot, and a machine conjoined in the strangest of ways, and for three days, I lived on board one, listening to its mechanical, electronic, and metabolic processes. “Our ships live here,” one of our guides told me, as we left rendezvous and transited deep into Nemaean interstellar territory. We’d jumped more than 300 light years, and as realspace closed back in around us, I saw the home of the leviathan ship surrounding me. There was virulent light just ahead, a stellar nursery simmering in a complicated brew of radiation and gravitational influences. Prodigious amounts of energy spewed from the nebula baking the planetary system we’d just entered. The virulent, multi-spectrum wash of radiation was food for the ships. Food? It was here that we completed our diplomatic mission, here that we ratified new treaties with the strangest, and most troubling of our interstellar neighbors, and here that I learned of impending Core World extinction. This will not occur soon, and few believe it will ever happen at all, but in light of Nemaean strangeness and their adaptation to space (rather than space’s adaptation to them) they have taken the reigns of evolution into their own hands, and they have changed (and are changing) in accordance to what the galaxy itself demands. The galaxy, in the long run, will favor them, I think…while we (ruled by small men) will simply watch our corporate profit margins and human resource ratings, while the impending blast of a supernova or gamma ray burst makes ready to sterilize at least a dozen of the worlds on which we depend for survival. I’m not entirely certain of what the Nemaeans think of this, but I suspect it amuses them. --Jonathan Krane (personal diary, unpublished) *** Yep, more Nemaean stuff. Nefarious DrO made the ships: I just appropriated them. The nebula, the space gunk, and the intense UV drive flares are my own, as is the text. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading and seeing, and thank you for dipping into this little piece of the Nemaean realm.