The engines of the shuttle craft roared to life, and drove the transport into the air. Inertial dampeners engaged seamlessly, and the result was that aside from the sound, Sara didn't feel like they had even left the ground. Once they were over the capitol, Master Brajerian waved his hand in a flourish in front of a window, causing a holographic display to take over the majority of the wall. In the display, Sara could see the whole city from up on high, and she was fascinated by how peaceful and intricate the city appeared.

"What do you think of the Tahlian Realm, now that you've seen it?" Master Brajerian inquired casually of his subordinate, the first human soldier in the Royal Army.

"It's amazing what your people have accomplished..." her words trailed off as more of the city came into focus as they gained altitude.

He turned to his right ever so slightly, and added "what was the one thing, above everything else, that surprised you the most?"

Sara looked up and thought for a moment, her face twisting into a very thoughtful expression. "The fact that I never had to worry about crime, nor did I ever see any police or anything like that."

That answer brought out a genuine smile to the Tahlian commander's face. "Such is the result of a society having never embraced evil and sin in the first place."

"Must be nice to live in a perfect society..." she muttered, and turned her focus back to the city, which continued to grow without end in sight.

"To the contrary, Sara, Tahlia is not perfect. There is a difference--a big difference--between a society not embracing sin, and a society being perfect." He waved his hand in front of the projection, but this time in a counter-clockwise direction, and the display changed to one of the entire galaxy. Several worlds were lit up prominently, and he pointed to a cluster of them. "Roughly in the Earth year 67 A.D., the Royal Navy engaged two armadas of warships from the Venarii Directorate and the Corollian Empire." The hologram focused in on the cluster, and Sara could start to see some of the details of the battle that took place there. "This was during the time that our armed forces were still recovering from the invasion of our territory by the Luciferians. Times were desperate, and we took some shortcuts..."

His voice trailed off and the room fell silent for several painful moments. "The races that were growing on these outlier worlds had been thoroughly corrupted by Luciferian dogma, and were allowing their worlds to be used as a staging ground for attacks on us, and the worlds under our hegemony. After we won the battle, and drove the enemy from this galaxy, we felt that the only way to seal off our galaxy from further attacks was to make an example out of the inhabitants of these worlds to prove the folly of choosing to side with the Luciferians..."

The display zoomed in on one of the worlds toward the center of the solar system, and he finished by saying softly, "we didn't nuke their worlds, for that is not our way. Instead two fleets of capitol ships entered the atmosphere, and turned their main batteries on the population centers. Within minutes we had slaughtered forty percent of their population. God understood, and saw no evil in this for they had chosen treason, and this fate was technically justified, but you see, Sara..." He looked over at her with pain in his eyes, "this is the difference between being without sin, and being perfect. If we were perfect, this wouldn't have had to happen."

Sara felt chilled by this confession because it was a side of the race that she fought with that she had never seen before. Normally they were supremely confident in themselves and their mission, sometimes bordering on being painfully arrogant, but the chasm between human and tahlian seemed to have narrowed substantially in these last few minutes of conversation. "Were you..."

He interrupted her, "yes, I was there when it happened. Not only was I there, but I commanded a large number of the ground forces that invaded after the initial bombardment, and I personally ordered them to lay waste to much of the remaining civilian infrastructure." He looked over at her, and his eyes no longer possessed the vague glow that they once had. "We made a point of targetting everything from industry, to transportation, so that they would be so thoroughly crushed that it would take them well over a hundred standard years at their level of technology to even get their economy restarted in earnest."

"It just seems so... evil... to target civilians that blatantly. Wouldn't it have been enough to destroy their government?"

He shook his head solemnly, and said, "Sara, this is war. Your people have the luxury of fighting low stakes wars with technology that until only recently couldn't accomplish much in the way of wiping out those that had been defeated." Without warning, the holographic display shifted to several worlds on the periphery of Brolin territory, and he pointed to one that looked like a burned out husk of a world, and said, "see this? This Brolin colony had almost thirty million colonists on it. The colonists refused to submit to Corollian domination, and so they were exterminated down to the last man, woman and child by the enemy in a matter of hours after they launched a failed insurrection. In this war, this is the face of failure."

In the right hand corner of their vision, their neural implants projected a status message saying that the transport was about to dock with the Ascendant Truth which was the flag ship of the Royal Navy's third armada. Master Brajerian wordlessly instructed the ship to end the holographic simulations, and they both walked over to the side hatch to await the end of their trip.