Starflight II: Won!

Not much of a "winning screen," but the ones that preceded this are full of spoilers. Read at your own risk.

 
The rest of Starflight II was running around on missions and uncovering the plot. I spent all that time logging planets and trading goods and then never traded anything again.

When I closed last time, I had just found the "most valuable thing" prized by the Tandelou. I returned it to one of the factions and ended their war, although they apparently still had their factional differences.

According to the Gorzek, the source of their factional discord is "minute deviations in 7 of 800,543 religious ceremonies."

Ending the war unlocked the Gorzek, who was able to tell me a lot more about the history of the galaxy. He had been built by the Leghk and somehow ended up in the frozen surface of an asteroid, from which the kindly Lowar released him and reprogrammed him to keep the Tandelou Eshvay and Eshvara from killing each other.

It turns out the Umnau weren't the "children" of the Uhl but a species that arrived in this area of the galaxy some 800 years ago, at the same time as the Lowar. When the singularity appeared 450 years ago, the Umanu suddenly turned hostile and attacked the Lowar, much like the Leghk did to the Dweenle and their own people. The Lowar, seeking to defend themselves, established a Center for the Study of Leghk Technology and dispatched a ship through the singularity to the Halls of Memory, but it never returned. (It was the wreck of this ship that I encountered earlier.)

Gorzek chronicles the galaxy.

The Gorzek gave me the coordinates for the Center for the Study of Leghk Technology as well as the Umanu and Lowar homeworlds in the nebula. I managed to land on the Umanu homeworld without encountering any ships, but there was nothing to find there. The Lowar homeworld had a beacon warning me to stay away from a Shyneum planet where there was something horrible.

Well, jeez. Now I have to go.

The Center had an obscure clue as to the location of the Halls of Memory: "A green class A star in an equilateral triangle with the Hook and 6 yellow stones."

The key to this riddle came from the Dweenle, who told me that the Hook was an old Leghk name for a constellation in the upper-left quadrant and the stars that went nova, forming the cloud nebula, were 6 yellow stars. If I assumed they were at the center of the nebula and drew a line between that location and the Hook, that left two possibilities for the other point of the equilateral triangle. One was in open space where the map showed no stars, and one was in the middle of a small nebula. I tried the second location and hit upon the right planet.

Triangulating the Halls of Memory.

The Halls of Memory were just a ruin, though, so I figured it was time to go back in time.

The journey through the singularity wasn't any easier than the first time, but it occurred to me--after a couple of disastrous trips--to raise my shields before going through (duh), and that got me to the other side without a scratch. Upon arrival, I noted that the Cloud Nebula was gone; it was just regular space, with the 6 yellow stars still intact. This jived with my assumption that the portal would take me back to the time that the Leghk created it, during the war with the Uhl and just before their extinction.

The six stars that would eventually create the Cloud Nebula lie below me.

Dodging hostile Leghk in every sector, I headed for the Halls of Memory again but found the planet guarded by a mechanical sentinel I couldn't pass. I reasoned this must be the guardian for which the Dweenle had the key.

Since the Dweenle existed in the distant past, too, I headed off to find some. They were their usual depressed selves. (I thought the game might have some fun with it by making them a happy and carefree race before the Leghk disappeared and left them friendless, but alas.) They didn't offer up anything until I took the time to travel all the way to the bottom of the galaxy and find them some nid berries. After that, they happily gave me the riddle as to where to find the key: "Round a fallen star of four is a world of humming stones. Here, where nothing meets nothing, the transmitter awaits our return."

I'm getting a lot of use out of this "playback" feature.

I reasoned that the "Fallen Star" might be another Leghk constellation name, consulted a playback of my conversation with the Dweenle, and found that I was right. The constellation has four stars, one of which is slightly below the others, as if it was "fallen." I don't really know what the "humming stones" part was about, but the star system only had four planets, and I tried the 0,0 coordinates on each ("nothing meets nothing") and found the transmission beacon on the fourth.

Returning all the way to the top of the galaxy, I was able to get past the guardian and to the Halls of Memory. There, I encountered a group of living Leghk who hadn't been corrupted by the Uhl.

In a long bit of exposition--regrettably offered in summary form rather than dialogue--the Leghk told me that the Uhl is a single creature with molecules spread out over many parsecs of space, bound by faint electromagnetic energies. The creature regards other sentient races as viruses, and its modus operandi is to clear out a system by taking over one of the races, using them as an "antibody" to the others. When the Leghk created the singularity in a failed attempt to escape, the Uhl exploited it to send itself to the future and take over the Umanu.

The Leghk appear to be giant sperm.

The Leghk created a weapon to destroy the Uhl but it was in two halves, and one half was lost to a planet taken over by corrupted Leghk. They still had the other and happily gave it to me, along with a data crystal outlining various weapon and shield upgrades. With nothing else to do, I returned through the singularity to the present, wondering if now that I had the data crystal, the Spemin wouldn't be able to find it in the future, which means I never would have been on the quest in the first place, meaning I wouldn't have the data crystal, and so on. Fortunately, I remembered Questron II's insistence that doing things in the past can't change the past--only the present from the point you go back in time--so the paradox happily resolved itself.

At starport, I found that the upgrades afforded me Class 7 shields, plasma weapons in place of missiles and lasers, and something called a "battle jumper" that would allow me to teleport around the battlefield.

But lacking the last bit of the Leghk weapon, and not knowing where to find it, I was again adrift for a while. I traveled about, conversing with the various races, until at last I returned to Gorzek and found that he was the second piece of the Uhl weapon. He readily fused with the other half and told me to use him when I encountered the Uhl. (No word on whether the Tandelou factions will now annihilate each other without Gorzek's presence.)

I had a pretty good idea where to look, thanks to the beacon on the Lowar homeworld. I headed into the nebula towards the "Shyneum planet" where the "awful thing" resided.

I kept forgetting to mention this, but every time I entered the nebula, my two human characters--my pilot and science officer--started to act weird. This weirdness would progress to schizophrenia and finally put them in a catatonic state if I didn't leave the area reasonably quickly, thus necessitating a replacement or reload. This should have been a sign. This time around, I just kept pressing forward, and the two of them died before the end of the game. I guess one of the other characters assumed captains' duties, and by then the science officer was somewhat superfluous.

Approaching the Shyneum Planet, I was swarmed with a fleet of Umanu ships. I took me five tries to defeat them all. The key turned out to be watching for their special ray weapon and using the "battle jumper" to disappear before they could fire it. The rest was just avoiding missiles and firing my plasma weapon until they were all dead.

Once I had destroyed the Umanu ships, the Uhl appeared. I deployed the Leghk weapon against it, and it destroyed the Uhl's shields before the Uhl destroyed it. At that point, the Uhl hailed me and offered to depart for another part of the universe, but I told it to sod off, re-entered combat, and destroyed it.

 

The Umanu, now free, sent a transmission from the planet below, and lo and behold, they were human! I guess I should have figured that out from the name. More than that, it turns out that the Lowar were Elowan, and both they and the humans arrived in the area at the same time as part of the "Project Noah" expeditions from Earth, chronicled in the first Starflight.

My own "Umanu" are conveniently dead at this point. [Later edit: I just realized he's addressing this communication to the Dweenle member of my crew, Blahdodum. Great. After all that work, the humans I saved think that the Dweenle are their saviors.]

Scarcely had I digested this when the game gave me the screen at the top of the posting and dumped me to the DOS prompt.

But not before this bit of silliness.

In retrospect, the turn had been reasonably well-telegraphed: "Umanu" and "Lowar" sound reasonably like "Human" and "Elowan"; the Lowar were specifically described as plant-based species; their arrival in the galaxy matched up with the timeline of the Project Noah expeditions; and my two human crewmembers were clearly falling under the Uhl's influence. I was surprised by it anyway.

Later edit: As Amy points out below, I completely overlooked another obvious connection. The Uhl is clearly the same type of being as the Uhlek from the first Starflight, whose destruction I described in a posting on that game. Moreover, the name of that race, the Uhlek, sounds suspiciously like Uhl+Leghk. In the first game, though, the destruction of the Uhlek seemed to make all of its ships disappear, not free them from mental servitude. But perhaps they just freaked out and went somewhere to regroup and would have appeared in Starflight III.

The twist wasn't quite as good as the first game's, but it was still an entertaining storyline, and I enjoyed slowly uncovering the mystery towards the end. I like games like this, Morrowind, and precious few others, where you have to piece together the background from clues and messages, some of which are easy to miss. The puzzles were also well-done in this latter section, requiring a combination of lore, cartography, and logical inference.

My only big complaint is that I was really looking forward to extracting some serious vengeance on the Spemin. But they apparently ceased to be a problem the first time I defeated them, because I never heard about them or had any issue with them again.

GIMLET to come!