"Interesting, I would like to hear more about that engine."

"Ah, but you were found 67,530 light years from Vulcan, which did imply to us that you had encountered some sort of subspace phenomena. After this long, it is hard to say what precisely."

"Far indeed, then! The ship used an experimental singularity drive, but it certainly could not travel at thirty times lightspeed. It had only even passed light at all in the most rarefied of laboratory conditions. How do your own ships travel?"

A singularity drive? It sounds increasingly like our dear Romulan friends remember more of their past than they are willing to admit to...

"Ah, yes. Warp drive is technically a piece of military technology, a rather vital one. In the abstract though, matter and antimatter are combined through a medium, which creates electro-plasma. The electro-plasma is then pressurized and directed to create a protective bubble around the ship, and a ripple in spacetime that the ship rides."

"Interesting! I wouldn't think that a matter-antimatter reaction could create a spacetime distortion powerful enough to ride without also blowing up your ship. Though I suppose I have some reason to think my own culture's engine was not as safe as we hoped it to be."

"At this point it is a well established technology, there are still experiments being done with it, but most are dedicated to passing the warp limit, which seems an arbitrary restriction on speed. However, no currently spacefaring people has passed it, with the exception of certain highly specific circumstances involving outside forces."

"It can also blow up the ship, but that happens very rarely outside of combat."

"I'd be interested in hearing more about that. Jaleyl was not familiar with any particular limitation on speed in distorted space, merely with the overwhelming practical difficulties involved in moving beyond the speed of light."

And in time the conversation will circle back to Cardassia's questions for R'vneh.

The Jaleyli perspective on war is one of weighed costs. Small, warring tribes are wasteful. They destroy capital faster than they produce it, they get their most talented individuals killed in combat faster than they can train more. Cities are better, able to grow in ways that last, able to pass on their best techniques through multiple generations. Cities that are capable of trade with each other do better still, able to leverage scale and comparative advantage to push towards projects that can't be better-attempted by a single particularly-skilled individual.

R'vneh's father discovered early that wartorn tribes are a liability to the survival of the entire species, and he began to forcefully unite them into a sustainable and safe nation. The benefits were obvious, and the wars proceeded until his home continent had no independent tribes and few independent cities. This permitted them a life expectancy eight times higher than in the original tribes, and a national crime rate a third as high per capita as the average T'Khanan city. As of R'vneh's departure, most of the world had managed to come as far as cities on their own, but the cities were waging more-useless wars against each other. Many cities would fight over access to specific resource reserves like lakes or trade routes, or just over serious disagreements like philosophical affiliation. Since the cities rarely ended up politically merged afterwards, R'vneh feels they had no mitigating value.

Jaleyl also had a policy of not invading anywhere that was even plausibly well-run. Independent cities like ShiKahr were able to maintain their own technological base and trade with Jaleyl, and Sudoc preferred to avoid damaging their sovereignty when they weren't actively attacking. Though they often did attack, and needed to be put down or subsumed. R'vneh herself is mostly trained in governance at a city scale. It sounds like Cardassia has less of an issue with sporadic and piecemeal rebellions, so perhaps they have better insight into planetary management and peacekeeping.

As has been mentioned, the Cardassian goal in war has long been resource acquisition. Ocett's own parents have stories about going hungry during the famines eighty years ago, before the occupation of Bajor began.

Most Cardassian expansion before reaching Bajor had been simple colonization efforts or trade agreements, with no real need for military action, but the Bajorans were in chaos. They had a spiritual government and a secular government that were constantly at odds and prevented each other from ever taking action, the Union initially wanted to engage in trade, and the secular government agreed quickly. The spiritual government immediately started interfering with the fulfillment of terms to such an extent that the secular government requested aid in restoring supply lines, the military agreed on the condition that they become a member world of the Union, and they accepted.

The Occupation took far longer than anyone expected, and consumed almost as many resources as it generated. While the Union was at war with the Federation, the casualty rates on the front lines were almost the same as they were on Bajor to the Resistance.

"I certainly hope that it would have worked better at a smaller scale."

Disappointing that these issues still occur amongst the stars, but none of this is fundamentally confusing to R'vneh. T'Khasi, unfortunately, did not have a comprehensive solution to the difficulty of growing lots of food on very dry planets. She'd be happy to go over their notes on efficient water-harvesting and hydroponics farms that don't lose significant moisture to the atmosphere and so on, but obviously their ongoing wars are a more serious concern. What's Ocett's personal or civilian perspective on the current wars, if she doesn't have permission to present the details yet?

"Well, the Klingons claim to have invaded because they didn't believe our government could have transitioned as quickly and safely as it did without interference from the Dominion. To an outsider, this may seem reasonable, the Founders are talented shapeshifters, and they have infiltrated the Federation's government. However, at that time, the Founder moved quickly to attempt to involve the Federation and the Tzenkethi Coalition in another war. Given the common feeling after the Battle of the Omarion Nebula, when the Order was lost, and the fact that we have been strongly on a defensive footing, most citizens doubt that we have been infiltrated."

"We are somewhat more careful with operational security than the other major powers in the quadrant."

"Since the initial attack from the Klingons, additional losses have been small, although they are a constant threat to interstellar shipping lanes, and have been gradually expanding their claims on Union territories. They have also declared war on everyone else in the quadrant, so most Cardassians are not concerned about them in the long term."

"The Klingons are concerned about shapeshifters substituting themselves for your administrative officials? Do they rely on appearance to determine the integrity and validity of orders? Do you rely on appearance to determine the integrity and validity of orders?"

"They do, and have implemented some rather barbaric testing regimens to supplement that system."

"The Founders can perfectly mimic all of the biometrics we would usually use to verify identity, and in that respect we are somewhat insecure. In the known incident of replacement, blood samples were taken to demonstrate who was the imposter, as any part of a founder that is removed from them immediately reverts to their natural, gelatinous state, but that individual found a workaround within an hour, and so we assume that the only known detection method is unlikely to succeed on any imposter who knows to expect it."

"However, all non-emergency orders are passed through a decentralized bureaucracy, requiring approval from three different individuals in different cities before they can be followed, and emergency orders currently require authorization from two thirds of the Detapa council. As very few Founders are willing to travel alone, the Cardassian people are more than willing to believe in the overall integrity of the State."

"Do you predict that the Klingons would react positively to news of a superior method for identity verification? Or is that not their true determining factor in waging this war?"

"Oh, they'd love it. It would change nothing though."

"They like war. The longest they've been at peace in recent memory was only 10 years, and that ended in a civil war."

"The stinking brutes consider the pinnacle of their culture to have been over a thousand years ago, when one of them invented a more efficient method of stabbing, and they're constantly trying to re-enact it. - But they had no such reason to declare war on everyone else, and likely wouldn't trust any newer testing method, especially if it comes out of Cardassia."

"Ah well. Inconvenient, but obviously there would be less war if not for those who pursue it when inefficient and even disadvantageous."

"Indeed."

"I am looking forward to being able to provide you with more details, our methods may be relatively secure, but they are not as swift as one might hope in some situations."

"Of course."

And R'vneh will return to designing preliminary psionic technology that the Cardassians might be able to actually build.

Psi-lensing diamonds is not something that Cardassians have much experience in, but diamonds are one of the easiest arrangements of carbon to replicate. If R'vneh can sketch the precise shape of the lens it will be much easier than miniaturizing the necessary radiation shielding.

Do they have any other equipment from the Koon Heya? Any of the computers, including the minimal system in the cryopod, would have some basic definitions of technical specs. R'vneh could use those to define a lens exactly. Though the psi-lensing process requires treating the lenses with a high-intensity psionic field, so they aren't ideal as a first step.

Fair enough, Pirak will focus on radiation shielding for now.

She appreciates the help. How much radiation shielding will they actually need? ...How big is this prototype going to have to be?

It's going to end up about 15kg and 35 centimeters along its shortest side, we should be able to reduce it in iteration though.

Meh. A little unwieldy, but it'll do. R'vneh will talk Pirak through the basic engineering considerations, how conscious thought creates particular coherent subspace ripples that can be identified by a properly-tuned resonance chamber. This chamber is a bit weirdly-shaped, because it's intended to catch many possible patterns that will all resonate differently from one another. It's actually a lot easier to make an emotion-detector that detects exactly one emotion, but R'vneh has only the barest clue what Cardassian emotions might look like under this model, so they're going to go with something hilariously overpowered for the task, instead.

Pirak is taking a lot of notes and asking a lot of questions. This is really interesting! She hasn't worked much with psionics before, and it seems really elaborate and hard to work out from first principles for a non-psion.

Her attempts to grasp the structures are occasionally weakening her defenses against telepathy, and R'vneh can get small senses of her emotional state.

"If emotions are detectable as waveforms in subspace, how long have your people been aware of subspace? Normally scientists develop a faster than light drive before even beginning to study the nature of subspace properly."

She's very frustrated, somewhat awed, and annoyed with herself for feeling awed.

Stet! Do all telepaths work like this? How telepathic are the Romulans? Can Romulans stetting hear ships dropping out of warp? Aliens are the worst!

The annoyance is taking over the rest of her emotional spectrum.