"So you're from the Federation?"

"Both of my parents' planets were among the founding members. The alliance with the Amalien Alliance is in my opinion one of the most pressing issues in the galaxy right now, so I managed to finagle a position here - they were looking for non-Starfleet personnel for cultural reasons."

"Starfleet is..."

"In effect, the Federation military, though in peacetime it serves exploratory and scientific functions."

Lucien is going to stay quiet until it's obvious he should say something. He just realized that he was openly discussing DNA sequencing with a Federation representative and genetic modification is on their list of banned things only barely below the prime directive in importance.

He's mentally scheduling an hour later to figure out what he could have done better here and what he should do going forward - he messed up and he has the time free later to think through how but now's not that time.

"Apart from what you've already described is there a lot of wartime?"

"Few full scale wars. Substantial numbers of smaller dustups about borders and such which prompt mobilization and incentivize being ready for the possibility of escalation."

"But whatever tactics allowed those to stay small dustups didn't work?"

"The Borg and the amaliens don't have very much in common but neither responds in a conventional manner to posturing and displays of power, or to being offered a face-saving way to back down from their original demands."

"My species didn't have any recorded wars prior to meeting the Federation. Other members of the Amalien Alliance are different but none of them have had wars of the scale of the ones we've mentioned. We did inter-vene in a civil war of a now member state."

"How did you intervene and how did you choose how to do it?"

"Offered transport and resources to one of the sides, in addition to some auxiliary troops. We did it to stop a genocide that we thought would kill upwards of a hundred million people, and made sure out intention wouldn't pro-voke a country geno-cide or require on going military aid."

"We didn't give them weapons and made sure al-ter-natives to fighting were available to the losing side with amnesty to most soldiers guaranteed."

"How did the other side react?"

"A majority of troops surrend-erd pretty quick-ly, our alternatives were pretty nice and the advanced technology were had scared them I think. Core leadership and small military division re-mained. After that we intervened to stop weapons of mass destruction from being used but didn't take further sig-nificant action."

"I'm curious how you determined that this would be workable - that they'd get scared and back down - when this is not how you reacted and you had no history of war yourselves."

"Oh, we we were actually surprised at how quickly they surrended. We expected the war to be over quicker than it would have been without our intervention, to have fewer deaths, and to resolve in long lasting outcomes that were better. What happened was better than we expected."

"We thought that the median case without our intervention was a long and bru-tal war the opposing side would have won, with a successful genocide."

"We did consult with others in our alliance who had experience with internal wars, that's why a coop-erative government that was unlikely to be vengeful was a major part of our willingness to intervene."

"What's the general sentiment like on that planet now?"

"I believe there's a small state on the new island we created where many of the more ardent supporters of the losing side live and have policies banning the people they attempted to genocide. The rest of the world allows immigrants from that island. There's occasional issues of terror-ism, but the deaths from that are small compared to the war or genocide - a few hundred a year on the 12 billion person planet I think? Mostly people seem happy, wealthier then they did before, and assimilated into the Amalien Alliance."

"Hm... A few things that havn;t come up but you might want to know? Before we had finished deciding on whether or not to intervene the Amalien Ambassador on that planet inter-vened themself to sab-otage the transporation of troops that were headed to massacre a neighborhood. We decided this was justified later, but have been working harder to avoid that sit-uation and e-specially to put anyone who isn't really trusted anywhere near a sit-uation where they would have to make a decision like that."

"Also, we knew when we did this that we were ... taking act-ions in the direction of installing a puppet gov-ernment? Most planets at that level of develop-ment don't assim-ilate into the Amalien Alliance's culture as fast as that planet did after the war. We tried to avoid taking more power than we had to but also we didn't want the winning side to hurt the losing side a bunch as happens after a lot of wars."

"That's interesting but I was asking about sentiment, not governance structure."

"Oh. It's been um, 60 years or so since that war ended I think and mostly they seem split between 'we should work really hard to remember all the bad things people were doing and be happy we stopped them and won' and 'we should move past it'. Overall they are happy and fairly similar to any other Amalien planet."

"You've been doing this for more than sixty years? I don't think I realized that."

"We had our first contact with the Federation over a century ago and started giving out technology not too long after that."

He can look up the exact dates if Isabella wants.

"And how long have the Borg been a going concern?"

Around forty years.

"Goodness. I suppose then nothing would have stopped you from arriving during Delilah's tenure as Archangel, or even Alleluia's, if you'd timed things a bit differently."