Hive Queen Quest 59.3

This! Our commonwealth buddies take primacy over the corrupt Union, got to remember that.

Ooh boy what a time to be awake.

we should have movie night with the commonwealth.

IT'S HAPPENING!

We could show off our haptic holograms!

Wind whips through allies, sending dropped papers and trash whirling through the air as storm clouds quickly form around your emerging fleet as their blink drives disturb the local atmosphere, the sudden discharge of their drives sending lightning arcing between them and rolling through the sky. The clouds glow vibrantly in brilliant flashes of light as larger ships further up in altitude blink in, battlecruisers carving paths through the sky as their arrival casts harsh shadows across the surface below. Battleships emerge into existence, sending shock waves across the sky and punching holes in the growing storm kilometers in diameter where the rest of the fleet can be seen to still be arriving further up in low orbit as the storm clouds mix and swirl around your fleet. Lightning leaps from ship to ship, striking down along the skyline of New Prescott as sirens wail throughout the city.

A new star appears in orbit, shining through the clouds like a lance, casting shadows of your ships along the surface as a rolling thunderclap drowns out the sounds of police and raid sirens across the city, and as the light quickly subsides the clouds part in a sudden shock wave that shatters windows and sets off car alarms across the streets bellow, and your Hive ship emerges from the upper layers of clouds, its spine reaching six kilometers over the city and sealing away what light there was remaining as lightning discharges across its vast, living hull.

Your ships detect gnats. Insignificant vessels, various atmospheric or orbital fighters converging on your fleet and spiraling through the air among your ships as you cast your shadow over Gemini.

I was thinking more from the angle of "the Commonwealth should be able to use this to their advantage, but we recommend they settle their conflict quickly before the Black Queen and Ceph show up."

So much HAPPENING right now.

YES
TIME FOR CHEEKY MOTHER

I was thinking of colonizing Eridani to try and get their tech and brownie points anybody else interested?

"Back straight, elbows away from the table, and for god's sake that's the wrong spoon." A drone's claw slaps the small spoon out of Lee's hand as Elizabeth speaks, her hologram flickering in the seat across the table.

"How do you even know the difference?" Lee asks.

"I had to attend my share of official dinners and government functions in my day. It was detestable, but it tends to be the only way to get funding of any decent ammount." Elizabeth says. "Regardless, you don't need to know the difference. I know it, so the Hive knows it, and with your new connection, that means you know it. Stop focusing on trying to figure it out yourself and use the Hive's collective memory." She gets up from her seat and her image flickers as she moves through the table. "The human brain is very elastic, it can adjust quickly to new situations. In time you'll get used to it, but for now, think of it like a question posed to the Hive, as if searching something on the net, only mentally."

"Alright..." Lee says as the room begins to rumble lightly for a moment. A speaker quickly moves to the table.

"We have arrived!" It chirps. Lee looks at the drone with concern.

"Did they shoot at us?"

"No, bad weather." You say. Lee only looks more concerned.

"How close did you blink us in?" He asks. Your speaker chitters softly.

"Close enough."

>Open communications with the Union (write in)
>Send an Ambassador drone in person via shuttle
>Send Lee to the surface via shuttle
>Other (write in)

QUICKLY
POST APPROPRIATE MUSIC FOR THIS MONUMENTAL OCCASION
youtube.com/watch?v=D7iRoTqUvcg&feature=youtu.be

>Open communications with the Union
You should very well know why we're here.

>>Open communications with the Union (write in)
For a long time the Hive has watched the Union from a distance, seeking to understand your society and your trustworthiness to the Hive. We have been bitterly disappointed. We now demand you deploy the senior diplomatic unit, the Alder to the hive for negotiations and recognition of the Hive's sovereignty, which you have violated time and time again.

MUSIC
youtube.com/watch?v=1z-D9D_LzwA

>Open communications with the Union (write in)
"Hello humans. This is a diplomatic mission."

Let's not tip our hand completely. Maybe "your leaders should know very well why we are here." The actual civilians don't know shit.

>"How close did you blink us in?" He asks. Your speaker chitters softly.
>"Close enough."
holy kek

HYPE

>Open communications with the Union (write in)
"HELLO HUMANS, WE HAVE COME TO DIPLOMACY"

>>Send an Ambassador drone in person via shuttle
Oh yes.

Time to invite them to our parlor.

>Your ships detect gnats. Insignificant vessels, various atmospheric or orbital fighters converging on your fleet and spiraling through the air among your ships as you cast your shadow over Gemini.
muh dik

>>Send an Ambassador drone in person via shuttle

>>Open communications with the Union (write in)

HELLO UNION HUMANS. WE MEAN YOU NO HARM AT THIS TIME. HOWEVER, MANY EVENTS HAVE HAPPENED RECENTLY THAT REQUIRE DISCUSSION. PLEASE SEND AN EMISSARY TO OUR SHIP WHO IS ABLE TO SPEAK INTELLIGENTLY ON THESE MATTERS.

Supporting

>Let's not tip our hand completely.
I want to let the civilians know the Union leaders fucked up.

>Open communications with the Union (write in)
Lets tell them that the hive is most dissapointed to humans, but are willing to talk...also humans should sent speaker to us.

Oh, yeah, that's great.

>For a long time the Hive has watched the Union from a distance,
Let's not.

Also we should demand the representative of the planet humans call Talgo. Because that's where the Lee is native to!

No particular other reason. Publicly.

>>Open communications with the Union (write in)
>>Send an Ambassador drone in person via shuttle

BE NOT AFRAID. YOUR LEADERS SHOULD BE EXPECTING US FOR THEIR MISTAKES THAT HAVE ENDANGERED ALL LIVING BEINGS IN THIS GALAXY

No no, how about.

'The Union Queen will board for parley.'

I approve

Uh, just a note for later on, when conversation is underway. There is a way to sufficiently spook.

There was a race native to the region of space you call the Expanse, who sought to delve into the untested waters of a field of physics they poorly understood--waters that the Ceph now swim in freely.

They were exterminated by forces beyond their comprehension, and for millennia the last of them begged for the sweet release of death.

You will no longer find their homeworld in the Expanse. It was annihilated in its entirety.

Now, this is far more questionable if you want to add, because it admits to way too much knowledge about a hundred years ago, so we probably shouldn't: Humanity should count itself fortunate that they only lost their satellite.

>Open Communications with the union
>"The humans have brought attention to themselves. The attention of a the Great Enslaver. The humans will speak to the Hive, or be destroyed before they can be enslaved."

No reason to act stupid anymore. We're supposed to be the ancient civilization that ruled these stars, let's act the part.

Some variation of this would be nice. Although I'd personally add something about how the leadership has also been engaging in actions that should make them very aware of why we have decided to intervene now (but leave those "actions" unspecified in the broadcast).

They already know it's us on G-426 user, and that we've allied with the Unity. It's pretty damn obvious at this point.

I like this one. Let's see if they put K-man in a dress.

This is a good point.

Time to put on our serious face now. The Union fucked up and it's time to let them know it.

They don't know the extent of our alliance, just that we worked together to stop a cataclysm.

There's no point in being self-righteous. Most of the government had no idea what was going on, and none of the civilians did.

Hell, it's probably better we keep the civilians out of it anyway.

>the Alder

Uhhh.

Just be cautious here.

We don't want to actually give Alder all the secret experimental info the Tories have been up to, because you know what happens when you give the opposition that ammo? They destroy their opposition.

And unfortunately, unseating the Tories means leaving a power vacuum. And we won't get to pick what fills that vacuum. 99% chance it won't be Alder or a conventional Green.

If we demand the rep from Taigo we can also say we have had "dealings" with that "human-speaker" before (true!) and let the population use their imagination as to what that means.

The fact that we know each other well enough to perform a joint attack on a Union facility is more than enough to suggest that we have been exchanging at least topical information of the Union.

Or that evangelical Talgo fuck that presided over Lee's funeral as a political move

Let them all know, every last one. In fact, loudspeaker it over the city with the citadel. Even better, transmit it telepathically to the entire planet.

They don't know how much we've been watching though. Only that we had a method of noticing something going wrong on Tenebris.

And given the poorly understood nature of the physics they were working with, with the void shard artifact, it could be anything related to that as far as they know.

>Not wanting to cause an uproar against Killinger and his fuckup cronies
>Not wanting to ruin Killinger's chances of re-election.

>entity is empowered by creatures knowing about it
>tell everybody about it

How about no?

>Open communications with the Union (write in)
Via loudspeakers on shuttles as well as full-spectrum broadcast, if we can do that, so everyone on the street can hear.
"ATTENTION. ALL HUMAN ARMED FORCES STAND DOWN AT ONCE. HIVE WILL NOT FIRE UNLESS FIRED UPON. HUMAN LEADERSHIP REPRESENTATIVES WILL IMMEDIATELY BOARD HIVE SHIP FOR JUDGEMENT. YOUR COMPLIANCE IS MANDITORY."

We aren't invaders. This is terrible.

Knowledge of this thing is dangerous. Best keep that a secret.

Yeah, I agree. There's no reason to specifically request Alder especially at this early stage. Let's just ask them to send a rep that can talk about all the shit that's been going down (which will certainly be one of the council anyway because only they know about the super fuckup at Nowhere), and let them decide who to give us.

>defeating one evil just to let a greater evil take his place

We have BLACKMAIL on Killinger. If you destroy him you won't have leverage over him anymore!

Plus, he's corrupt. And corrupt people will always make a deal under the table, and we are very under-tabley types. Like cockroaches.

>>entity is empowered by creatures knowing about it
>>>>

>There's no point in being self-righteous.
Where's the self righteous part? This is a purely a political move for leverage.
That user is talking out of his ass.

>"your leaders should know very well why we are here."
I like this one

No, I really want to destroy Killinger politically, his corruption just goes to far. He cannot be trusted even slightly, and if we just blackmail him by the end of the week he'll be doing whatever we told him not to in secret.

>Where's the self righteous part?
The part about blaming all of them for something most of them had no part in or knowledge of.

Union people are no different from Commonwealth people. It's certain parts of the government we have a problem with. And the only reason we don't have a problem with the Commonwealth just like with the Union is their first contact with us had them already afraid of us.

Why would the hive give a fuck about corruption? He's a tool. We have massive leverage over him. He can be trusted to work in his self interest.

If you want to make him suffer then we can roll that into whatever we'll do without exposing him, there's no point in throwing the tool away while we're at it.

>The part about blaming all of them for something most of them had no part in or knowledge of.
Nobody implied that.

When you barge into someone's home and start yelling at everyone, you are implying that.

>Ambassador coming through

>time to put on our serious face
>yelling at everyone
user, stop.

No he's not.

>To exist, you must hold them in your mind. That is the nature of our enemy.

The Void Gods can't see you unless you see them first. Mere knowledge of them is dangerous, as illustrated by the Black Queen's corruption and the other queens falling under the scrutiny of the Void Gods. White Queen literally made the humans to be incapable of perceiving the Void Gods so that they could interact with the Void Shards without drawing their attention because she would not be able to develop the Psionic Cannon on her own, being a psionic being. White Queen waited 50 thousand years for humans to develop that damn cannon so she could take their research for herself.

And now you want to tell the humans about them-who-stare-back-when-you-stare-into-the-depths?

Guy, guys.

Guys listen.

What if we-

Guys, listen! What if we made a thinker, guys, except.

What if we made a thinker, except it was a really big thinker?

What if it was like, several times bigger than the hiveship, so big it could only survive in zero-g, and it was only made out of brain tissue and nothing else.

What would happen, guys?

>He can be trusted to work in his self interest.
No he can't. Not at any level am I willing to place a single iota of trust in this waste of a human being. This is the same guy who single handedly started a war with the Commonwealth and successfully blamed them for initiating it. Bullshit just flows out of him like like water from a spring, he must be replaced.

I don't know I like acting stupid it makes us hard to read and allows us to get serious when we need to to add impact or weight to our words when needed

Corruption is a point in his favor. We are a foreigner, and therefore an outside corrupting force, from a human point of view.

You can always trust a selfish man to act selfishly. A corrupt politician will always act in his own self interest, and we can expose him later as soon as he becomes a liability.

But an honest man? The one most likely to take Killinger's place? You never know when someone's sincere. utterly selfless principles will make them do something incredibly...stupid.

What like the Deep Rot Think Tank from DAtS?

What would be the point?

>No he can't.
Yes he can. That's literally all he is. He's exactly the sort of person who will never go against his self interest, and if we put a big enough sword over his head, he's ours. Completely. Don't even need to implant him with a parasite, he's basically part of the hive if we want.

>The part about blaming all of them for something most of them had no part in or knowledge of.
This is politics dumbass.
>Union people are no different from Commonwealth people. It's certain parts of the government we have a problem with. And the only reason we don't have a problem with the Commonwealth just like with the Union is their first contact with us had them already afraid of us.
Your point? This politics. The only thing that matters is what we can use for leverage.
>That False Equivalency
Donald Trump does the same thing.
Look at where it got him.

What a pointless post. If you want to say something, then actually say it.

Well she did help them she even had a large psychic relay thier to guide them

That's retarded, we can't tell him anything without him at least trying to use it against us. And moreover, we can never trust him to do what he says he will do. If he swears on his mother's grave that his government will never touch the crystals again and he'll have anyone who tries strung up from the rafters, I can promise you in less than a month he will have secretly started a program to do just that. He will never just accept that an alien power has any power over him, and he will never stop trying to reverse that situation.

What would you imagine him to do, specifically, that wouldn't be selfish?

I mean, we can destroy him now, or we can destroy him later. Nothing wrong with putting it off to see if we can wring some use out of him first.

A year from now we can upturn democracy as we know it, since by then odds are we'll be in the endgame. But now with captain grassroots rising as a poorly-understood wildcard is a terrible time to shake the boat.

You watch as slender, building sized structures begin to tilt, fixing onto the Hive ship above and quickly warming as the anti-orbital batteries power themselves up as fleets of picket forces attempt to hold their formation amid your armada as the last of your smaller craft blink in along the outskirts of your swarm. Your direct your ship's antennae to the city below, and a crackling wall of static slowly forms into coherent speech as you fill every frequency with your broadcast. You find such forms of communication inconvenient, shouting your thoughts to the digital receivers below you which, with your fleet physically blocking their satellites, you realize, have no conflicting signal.

Holoscreens flicker to life in store windows and living rooms. Radios crackle with static in the dashboards of parked cars and window sills, breaking into a cackling cacophony of synthesised chittering voices.

"The Hive has watched your Union from a distance for some time now. Learning your culture and ways, permitting violations of our space to further our observations." The voices say. "We are disappointed. Your rulers know why we are here."

>Demand they send a diplomat to your ship
>Demand they receive your diplomat and send your drones
>Demand they receive your diplomat and send Lee with your drones
>Other (write in)

Music? youtube.com/watch?v=x8wnSmSW9nw

Politics has never been about morals but rather making the other guy look bad. And we want the Union to look bad.

>>Demand they send a diplomat to your ship (aLDER)
Only way for us to show off our new gravity plating and display our technological superiority over them.

>>Demand they receive your diplomat and send Lee with your drones

What are you smoking? They aren't the "other guy". We're trying to open diplomatic contact with them.

>>Demand they send a diplomat to your ship
AND THEY SAID GRAV PLATING WAS USELESS

>>Demand they receive your diplomat and send your drones

>Demand they receive your diplomat and send Lee with your drones

>Demand they send a diplomat to your ship
I'd vote for asking for Killinger specifically. After all, we've already had a "meeting" with him previously. However, I'm fine if we just let the Union bosses decide who they want to send.
Also, I love how QD phrased the demand over the radio. The writing in this quest has always been excellent.

You know what the likely alternative to Killinger is, right? The one foreshadowed for threads and threads now?

The one we can trust even less than Killinger, because he's a complete fucking wildcard and prime candidate for a sudden spiral into fanaticism that cannot be reasoned or compromised with?

Yes, K-man will constantly try to worm his way out from under our claw. But that's better than someone who isn't under our claw to BEGIN with, and who we can't possibly control.

Do you really think that other politician would ever be more pliable?

>>Demand they send a diplomat to your ship

That's some spooky as fuck music.

>>Demand they receive your diplomat and send Lee with your drones

>They aren't the "other guy".
They are. THEY ALWAYS HAVE BEEN. While Killinger is a slimeball the entire republic is a breeding ground for bastards like him.

>Demand they send a diplomat to your ship
Don't send lee until they try to force on us a human diplomat, i want it to be a surprise.