This is not true in all cases - amaliens might have gone without any contact since the warp signature was the result of a one off warp drive experiment by Vira and might not have been followed up with future activity, but this isn't really worth bringing up.

"Isabella was wondering about how this resulted in the Federation-Amalien war in particular."

"While other starfaring civilizations have at times interfered with less advanced ones - the Cardassians, for instance, have some habits in that direction - the amaliens were doing so at a much greater frequency and with a technological and industrial base that was largely Federation-derived. They achieved warp on their own but not a comprehensive space program. So some of the more vehemently pro-Directive elements in the Federation government opted to pursue a policy of clawback of the technology, the amaliens predictably resisted, and it escalated from there."

This is a remarkably reasonable summary of what happened! Lucien has nothing to add.

"And nobody attempted... diplomacy...?"

"Well, for certain values of 'attempted'. The amaliens weren't willing to relinquish what they had and the Federation wasn't willing to see it used to alter the development of prewarp species and neither side successfully thought of anything to offer of more importance until 'alliance against the Borg' was on the table as such an offer."

Lucien sighs.

"We were new to diplomacy on this scale and stretched sorta thin paying a lot of attention to diplomacy with the species we were giving tech to. The war with the Federation was bad, but disease and hunger and things were worse. There was a several day long ceasefire where we stopped giving out new tech and had diplomatic talks with the Federation and... I think our estimates on how many people died pre-ventable deaths because of that was in the millions."

"For a few days? How fast were you running around giving out things??"

"Fast, at that point during the war we were stopping by planets the Federation had already surveyed and found pre-warp civilizations on and dropping off a couple of amaliens and a care package and then continuing on to the next planet right away."

"If you're wondering they couldn't have sustained that pace indefinitely," T'Mir adds. "Warp doesn't go infinitely fast; they were catching up their neighborhood, and some species catch up faster than others for various reasons."

"Still!"

Lucien smiles a bit - he wasn't around for that early uplifting period but he's proud of the amaliens who had been.

"Yeah, though if we had been able to access surveyed places on the other side of Federation space we would have been able to help at that pace again for a bit. Later on we were more focused on helping the places we had found get up to speed faster, though we were still finding people occasionally and there was hope that if we managed to get a powerful enough alliance setup we could defend against the Federation and spare the resources to ramp up for a lot more exploration and uplifting. We uh, never got to that point - managing the Alliance wasn't easy and the Federation kept up the pressure by mo-bilizing more and more of their resources as the war dragged on."

Oh, has he said anything to offend T'Mir? Hopefully he has not but he was frazzled by the same-face thing and wasn't paying enough attention to politics.

She doesn't look offended, but she's a Vulcan!

"Wait a minute, how are you half-human? There are humans where I'm from - at least I think they're the same -"

"Well, they might just be very similar, but stranger things have happened."

"Oh that reminds me, Vira wanted me to check on whether you were okay with having your DNA sequenced?" he asks Isabella.

"I would have told you if I wanted to invite you to do that!"

"Okay. Uh, we aren't going to do it without your permission."

Oh no, something seems wrong here.

"That is my hope."

"What is the nature of your objection?"

"Well, I said no pending more research on what this would enable and then when I did the research it turned out there were many possible things it enabled that Lucien had not brought up."

"Oh, I recommended you do reading and noted that the things I could think were things where having your permission for taking your DNA wouldn't really be the main concern if we were liable to do them without your permission to do so? Uh, in general I used to err in the other direction and tell people a bunch of how Amaliens could take advantage of them or trick them and this... really didn't work out well as a strategy when I volunteered this infor-mation on it's own and I've ended up rec-ommending literature as an alternative sometimes?"

"Uh, I'd be fine with talking about the bad things we might be able to do, as well as the good things we are likely to be able to do if you are okay with us study-ing your DNA, which would be pretty sub-stantial I expect."

"I'm not interested in talking about it today. Perhaps your approach works fine with some people. I am certainly aware that if you happen to be bad actors in the specific fashion of taking samples without consent I am at your mercy."

"If talking to someone who does not themselves want your DNA for anything will help I can recommend someone or consult myself though I'm only a layperson."

"Perhaps tomorrow."

"Mhm."

Lucien feels like he is being bad at diplomacy here but he's hon-estly sorta confused about how to be good at diplomacy here.