After the Don finished talking he ambled toward the table and sat across from Chenzo. When conversation began he was not entirely hopeful that much would become changed in the eyes of either one of them. Their viewpoints, stirred from decades of radically differing experiences, had cemented deeply in their hearts. Chenzo saw the Nomads as wise, powerful beings that, given no hostilites by the Maltese, would be passive toward them. However, Harabero saw the Nomads as wise and powerful yes, yet he did not think them benevolent or passive, but as threats to the safety of the Maltese people. A set of the two same facts would yield opposing results by either of them, yet who could say which was really closer to the truth of the matter?
I do not believe them stupid. However, I do not agree that they are as safe or able to be trusted as you would say they are. We both know that they are powerful, yet will they keep this power forever away from us, even were we to try and "make peace" with them? We are different from the others, we are not an instant kill target, but what were to happen should they decide that, for whatever infathomable reason they may decide, that we are not worth keeping around any longer? They interfered into our sovereign space with warships and sat outside our one bastion of life, with full knowledge of our icy relations. That is not a feasible time or place to attempt to make peace. Was this a test of our respect to them, or a test of our ability to resist?
I was alive. I remember back 40 years ago when the spirits were but tales. Mere folklore and myth that no one had seen personally. They left us alone - they left all Sirius alone - for whatever reason. But that too changed. They decided that humanity had grown too great a threat and that they must be extinguished.
If they decide to change, just like they did all those years ago, and just like they did a few years ago, and just like they did yesterday when they crossed our boundary, would our lip service to them be enough? When they intrude inside our homeland with warforms, how far do we bend backwards before we have to defend ourselves, or break our backs believing they won't harm us?
Alejandro had become exasperated as he became more passionate. He attempted to tone himself back before he broke his character. He decided to take a different approach.
Those... spirits. There may be a communication barrier that was lost somewhere. And it will continue to be. We are not the same as them. Should we intend to mend relations, will conflict prove to be behind us as you believe it will, or will relations forever remain strained, uneasy, and restless as history has proven it has been? We have grown beyond children to them. Now we are as much of a threat as the Core or the Corsairs are, like it or not. If we choose to try and live peacefully with them, would they leave us alone forever? Or would they keep us contained and restricted so that we may never oppose them in the future? After all, only one of us may dominate Sirius. Or would they intend to display their passivity to us, all the while preparing a strike as on Toledo or Issoudon? The issue is that while we may pretend to be companions for a time, we both know that eventually we will clash. And as we know that it will happen, what worth is it to delude ourselves into holding a veil over our eyes and believing there is no threat in the moment, while we sleep with a battleship hovering over our city?
