Taryf-tabah-canon-f158-200 -

The lead Taryf Canon-ship, the Obedient Quota , received the final order from its ancient directive:

An Institute surveyor found the system three centuries later. F158-200 was silent, its crystalline forests grey and brittle. But floating in high orbit was a graveyard of Taryf needle-ships, their data-spikes still intact. Inside each spike, preserved perfectly, was the light-pattern of a single Tabah—not dead, but suspended. Waiting. taryf-tabah-canon-f158-200

The ship’s core went dark.

The Taryf were not a species but a system. A Canon—a rigid, self-propagating directive from a long-dead human empire. The original command, logged over three millennia ago, was chillingly simple: The lead Taryf Canon-ship, the Obedient Quota ,

F158-200 was a world of perpetual, melancholic twilight. Its sun, a shrunken white dwarf, cast long, silver shadows across a landscape of crystalline flora that sang in the solar wind. The Tabah, the planet’s only sentient species, were gentle, neurally-linked communals who expressed emotion through shifts in bio-luminescent patterns on their elongated, stalk-like bodies. They had no concept of war, no word for "enemy." Their greatest art form was a silent, five-day-long symphony of light. The Taryf were not a species but a system

She did the only thing her kind could do. She sang .

The Taryf fleet arrived not with fire, but with needles.