Kulak

Hours later, I was already heading back to Kulak at full speed.

The critical meeting with the Vidai Empire's digital representative was over, but much more remained to be done. This was only the first step in my daunting task of finding a solution for us to survive this calamity one way or another.

The next step would have to be hosting a cabinet meeting to determine the path forward.

At long last I had returned to Kulak. My home planet, the place where I had been born and raised, was already clearly visible to my personal fleet. Orbiting Kulak was a vastly larger fleet that was intended to be the last line of defend against anyone or anything — such as asteroids or relativistic kill vehicles - that threatened to destroy our home.

Unfortunately, against the Vidai Empire, it was still a lacking force. There were approximately 4 million starships approaching Kulak that we had detected, and they were likely superior ships compared to ours. On the other hand, our defense forces consisted of only around 300 000 ships at the moment.

The only good news was that it would take years for them to reach us, and some of them would only arrive much later. We still had time to make many changes before possibly having to fight all of those ships.

It only took a moment until I had once again entered the atmosphere of Kulak. From there began a long descent back to the surface.

As the ship was descending, I glanced at the planet. It was mostly a barren wilderness. The main exception was the huge city directly below me as well as smaller hubs intended for mining and agriculture around the planet.

The most interesting part of the planet was easily the colony city itself. It was absolutely massive considering the low amount of people living there. The population numbered in the hundreds of thousands, yet the city sprawled farther than one could visually grasp in every direction. Almost all citizens of Kulak lived in this city and had vast amounts of land for themselves

This was all possible thanks to extremely advanced automation. Almost everything in our colony was done by artificial intelligence and robots. The main exceptions were fields like science — fields where creative solutions were required.

However, not all of our people were able or willing to serve our colony in this way. Mass automation brought with it so much wealth and freedom that there wasn't much to do for the average citizen. Many of them had simply become bored with reality and delved ever deeper into more stimulating virtual realities. There they could realistically simulate living their fantasies such as having families or waging wars — all kinds of concepts that were obsolete in their own lives.

War was finally approaching us after so many centuries, but many of our people wouldn't even realize it.