"The Arata system is a little system with a small star and just one planet orbiting around it. The planet, Arata One is inhabitable just in few regions where the right combination of solar radiation, geological stability and terrain's chemical allow some kind of settlement. Indigenous life is very few, microorganism, a flora composed by few kinds of gigantic plants, no structured animals"

Dora-lac was an heereen very different from the ones we talked with before, he seemed to be more focused on science than diplomacy. He was also more talkative and less solemn in his phrases. I suspect he liked human race, somehow.

"We arrived there thinking it was the Teculpa Origin's home world so we were a bit concerned about its structure. As terraformers, we are able to do very deep analysis about planets and everything we found about Arata One was the opposite of what we were expecting. We started thinking we were wrong until we found structures made by an intelligent race. We easily found they were made by Teculpa hand."

"Why Arata One in the first place?"

"The information came from a study about Teculpa Origin mythology. It's a system very far from the sector where we and the Teculpa fight our war, so we hesitated a lot before deciding to come here. Our people decided we needed answers only after a long discussion"

Impossible to understand the feelings of Dora-Lac, with his voice transmitted by the translation device, but somehow I knew that they decided to come to us because they were nearly desperate. "Did you find answers on Arata One?"

"Our exploration mothership landed on the planet, giving our ship the task to inspect the surrounding area. They sent few drones inside the structures. The first few days gave us more questions and no answers"

"You found the images of the Teculpa fighting creatures resembling you, didn't you?" Cassandra asked. I had nearly forgotten the images found in the Teculpa library, but obviously she remembered.

"Teculpa Origin tells a story about a war against Heereen that never happened. Those images were related to that fake event" 

"But the images are there!"

"Our hypothesis is that Teculpa Origin came back to that planet centuries after they come to fight us and put them on the walls. Probably exactly to give more power to their myth, We are trying to give them a date"

I started understanding what kind of problems Heereen found in their search for the truth. "We will work about that when we all be on Arata One. For now just tell us what happened"

"We didn't know Teculpa Origin were pursuing us. They tried to attack us while we were on Arata One, but they didn't have enough firepower to fight against our mother ship, so they fled away. We had already discovered about the intelligent races of this sector and considering that one of them was Teculpa we feared Origin would go to them looking for help, as they actually did. So, the Haw was put in charge of the diplomatic mission to meet the races. The rest is known: Teculpa Origin stopped our talk and made an alliance with Teculpa Tau and Rafkins. The Tau came and tried to bomb us, but we raised a time barrier around our landing point, something they can't overcome. The stall is settled"

Dora-lac wasn't around us. During the dialogue I searched for his lights through all the windows of our fish tank, finding nothing. It was frustrating because it didn't seem a talk done through some kind of communication device, I had the feeling Dora-lac was looking on us from above, as a guardian of a zoo could do. As the Heereen I heard before, he seemed not concerned by the situation, he seemed not scared or upset. But he was able to relate with reality more than the other Heereen, an ability very useful to explain what was going on. However I was sure that he wasn't someone with the power to take decisions in that mission, he was a scientist, but that was never a real science mission, it was just an unconventional kind of warfare.

"So what do you expect us to help you finding?" I asked.

"Informations on Teculpa Origin, about why they hate us and why they fight against us"

Dora-lac waited a moment, then he added something I heard before. "And why they are wrong"