The Powers That Be by Aer-ki Jyr (best sci fi novels of all time .txt) 📕

to work with the water breathers. The amphibians would not like it here, due to the depths, so the ‘Shore’ worlds would be built for them, but the Primes were for the truest swimmers, and this world was not uninhabited.

As she swam she could feel the little fish around her, swimming frantically back and forth as they tried to avoid the larger predators. On other days she was down here hunting them…but not to kill. They required genetic alteration to change their nature from predator to defender, though specific templates had to be established for each race before such modification. Also, food ‘Splooshes’ had to be devised for them, which were like little balloons designed not to disintegrate in the water like most Star Force air breather food did.

Little machines would one day coat the seat floor drawing in resources from the depths and fabricating the Splooshes much like plants did, though these could operate without sunlight or other stimulus, for they operated on power cores that had to be refilled by carriers…and one day the little fish around her now would become some of those carriers. Carefully, piece by piece, she would alter the darkside ecosystem here that had one race only surviving on the carnage of another, and in its place would be waters of harmony…but that was a monstrous task Star Force had only achieved in 18 other worlds across their entire empire…and she had 193 planetoids here that were going to be terraformed into at least partial aquatic worlds.

It was so much work Ariel knew she would not be leaving perhaps for the rest of her life…but that thrilled her rather than depressed, for the work was what she desired. Fighting nature itself to free those born into horrible situations crafted beyond their choice. The ‘Lifesprings’ spoken of by the Founders were of great interest to her…yet they only seemed interested in the preservation of races, not individuals, and had crafted some to exist solely off the death of others.

Ariel knew that if she ended the killing here, overpopulation would cause a different kind of carnage as there became too many mouths to feed, for they would reproduce by instinct rather than wisdom. Those genetic instructions also had to be altered, and there was so many ways that a project like this could go wrong that Director Davis had not authorized such intervention except on rare occasions…but as an air dweller he had a different perspective from stepping on the little ones without even realizing it.

But in the water there were no steps, all floated, and as such the vast throngs of life could coexist in close quarters if they chose to…or were instructed to, and Ariel had convinced him to let her try on another world with a small ocean.

Her success there had given her his trust, and when he requested that she terraform this system into a massive aquatic civilization, Davis had left the details entirely up to her. She knew he was concerned about the lesser ones being accidentally harmed, but he also saw the potential benefit and had decided to withdraw himself from the matter in this rare case and let her take the lead.

Which meant success or failure was on her fragile shoulders…as was the fate of all ocean dwellers here and on the other worlds. She had to make this work, for she couldn’t stand to build cities while letting the carnage of the deep ocean continue. All deserved to live, but in order to give them a chance she had to fight nature itself…and as daunting a task that might be, she intended to win.

As Ariel swam a swift moving predator raced up towards her from the niche in the rocks to her right, but her telepathy enhanced by psionic upgrades and Essence allowed her to take control of its mind and cause it to relax enough for her to swim up alongside it and press a hand just behind its cluster of 18 eyes.

Follow the path, she said, having to use other means than words to insert her instructions into its mind…then when she finished it swam off and upwards, away from its hunting grounds in search of the promised location she had given it where there would be enough food that it would never go hungry again.

It wasn’t a hollow promise, for Ariel had set up feeding machines in a variety of places out here for different races. Sending predator and prey to the same location would be horrific, but isolate them and it would subdue the carnage until reprogramers could construct the necessary templates…approved by Ariel…and then begin to collect individuals and free them from the darkside shackles of nature imprinted into their genetic memory.

Ariel continued on, swimming a couple hundred meters off the seafloor as she searched for one of the larger ocean dwellers on this planet. They didn’t have a name yet, but she used the placeholder ‘ublu’ which came from her people’s original language and meant a ‘very friendly big guy.’

Except these ublu weren’t all that friendly. They weren’t predators, but kept to themselves for the most part aside from mating once every 12 years. They were also known to have chunks of their bodies missing from predators coming up and chewing on them, for they couldn’t outswim them, but due to their large size they wouldn’t easily be killed either.

Because of that they tended to go where most of the predators weren’t, and that typically was in the Jo’bi fields that would kill most predators on contact with their electrically charged spines that rose off the seafloor like grass…except they were the size of trees.

The ublu could withstand the strikes, whether by their composition or mass Ariel did not know, but they didn’t always stay in there and sometimes they would come out into the upper levels of the trench to feed on ‘sun saplings’ that were drifting