The Martial Unity

”The homoarachnoids have begun making some strange movements.”

In a highly isolated chamber, several strange lifeforms hovered in a circle. They bore structural humanoid resemblances with four limb-like appendages, even if they were much longer than those of a human. Their body was covered in a layer of deep purple feathers from head to toe.

While massive wing-like appendages were folded behind their backs, they were also feathered head to toe. They possessed three eye-like organs around several other facial features that resembled a nose and whiskers.

What was particularly of note was that their bodies had several openings and organs for inhalation and breathing, which they clearly were doing based on the periodic swaying motion across their bodies.

Several holes across their face, neck, shoulders, and abdomen slowly expanded and contracted in opposition to similarly placed holes on the other side of their body.

WHOOSH…

They floated above a cloud that was solid in its structure despite only being made of water vapor without even realizing it, almost as if not defying gravity was what took conscious effort. The air around them reeked of hydrogen and helium, a combination that would be extremely toxic for any avian creature in Gaia.

Yet, it was their breath.

Outside was a vast expanse of a deep purple sky that stretched beyond what even the eyes could see.

A sky that was filled with similar cloudy constructs that floated in the air alongside the establishment in which they were. Massive, hazy constructs could be seen even deeper in the sky, covering a large portion of it.

They were mega-infrastructure in outer space, revolving around the planet, as if shackling it symbolically.

Multiple stars were visible in the sky, each dimmed with the Dyson Sphere technology that covered them, absorbing at least half of all the light the star generated, allowing the remaining half to pass by.

Below the floating city of cloud buildings and establishments that hovered deep in the sky was what could only be described as an abyss.

An abyss of gas.

The deeper one gazed, the darker it got.

The atmosphere only grew more and more dense as one got deeper and deeper.

And it grew more and more violent.

RUMBLE

It was the homeworld of the Dessandrites, Vermaela I.

It was a gas giant.

The Dessandrites were the apex predator of an ecosystem of life that had evolved on a gas giant with a planet filled with a chemically active atmosphere that had largest amounts of carbon present in it, allowing for complex chemistry to develop in the atmosphere.

They were born high in the air.

They lived and breathed in the air.

A layer of atmosphere that was high enough in altitude not to have crushing gravity and inhospitable pressure, while being low enough where the density was high enough to allow complex chemistry to evolve.

The Dessandrites had evolved for many eons in the world of Vermaela I, learning to survive, hunt, and eventually dominate the world with their crafty intelligence.

But Vermaela I wasn’t enough.

They went beyond the world.

They developed an understanding of fluid mechanics and a manipulation of gas so advanced that it allowed them to escape the bounds of their world, growing far, far beyond it as they reached the stars.

Many millions of stars over a span of many, many millennia.

They were one of the major civilizations in the Orion Star Strand, having successfully carved a portion of it for themselves.

”Our latest intelligence reports document a shift in the mobilization efforts, the flow of military capital, and distribution of resources,” one Dessandrite spoke with an infrasonic chirping voice, as if a bird had learned to manipulate their chirps into a complex sequence of sounds.

WHOOSH

A three-dimensional hologram emerged between them from the floating cloud table.

It featured a portion of the Milky Way, zoomed into the Orion Star Strand, where several different portions of the star map were broadly part of different segments, marked by differing colors across a spectrum of colors that spread across the Orion Star Strand.

One of them had the symbol hovering over it, one of six legs at the corner of a hexagram web.

The symbol of the Homoarachnoid Web Civilization.

The marked territory under it was considered to be a part of the Homoarachnoid Web Civilization, marked in turquoise to match the fur of the Homoarachnoids. Adjacent to it was the Dessandrite Civilization’s territory that was smaller in volume, marked in a deep purple, the same as their sky.

The two territories, however, didn’t have extremely clear boundaries.

Instead, the deep purple and the turquoise marking their territories sort of tapered out and became more and more transparent the further out they went.

Star territories were not delineated with clear boundaries.

Rather, each civilization had a domain of influence that had several layers within it.

The central layer where the colors were densest represented core territories that hosted large amounts of population; these were the most heavily engineered, developed, and well-protected star systems that were so dense that even the vastness of empty space within each of them felt scarce relative to how much activity occurred.

A layer beyond that represented outpost worlds, surveillance apparatuses, observatories, bases, even some Dyson Spheres, and other less concrete presences with scarce population.

And beyond that was the third and the largest layer at the outskirts of the dimming colors that represented purely exploratory presences. These were distant probes sent out to simply collect data, a handful of unmanned crafts.

And it simply tapered out beyond that into a zone with no fixed presence at all, before reaching the third layer of the Homoarachnoid Web Civilization. That brief thousand light-year zone, known as the Strait of Krashnika, between the Homoarachnoid Web Civilization and the Dessandrite Sky Civilization, had become a war zone filled with warships, spacecraft, spacefighter units, and space infantry clashing against each other.

What drew the attention of the ten leaders of the Dessandrite Civilization, however, was strange movements on another side of the Homoarachnoid Web Civilization.

The side that faced the Aquadite Ocean Civilization.

The Dessandrites had managed to catch signs of secret mobilization.

”They are planning something, but none of our intelligence analysts are able to deduce what they are planning,” one Dessandrite said with a severe expression. ”This is bad. If they have some secret tactic or strategy, or if they have managed to get the Aquadites to join in.”

The male was Lord Sheshank, the Alpha of the Firebreather Tribe, representing trillions of Dessandrites in the authority vested in him. He was one of ten elected leaders of ten distinct tribes among the Dessandrites, an authoritative figure with tremendous amounts of power.