Harammins

Harammins are a fictional alien race in the series of novels The History of the Galaxy written by the Russian science-fiction writer Andrey Livadny. They are the only other known humanoid race besides humans.

Most, if not all, encounters between the humans and the Harammins have been violent. These blueskinned aliens attempt to destroy anything and anyone they feel is a threat to them or to the status quo they have established long ago in their area of space.

Known Facts

Very little is known AbOUT the ancient history of this race. Most known records date back roughly 3 million years ago to the time known as the Forerunner Crisis, during which a massive swarm of semi-sentient spaceborne beings known as the Forerunners were approaching the area of space currently known as the Sleeve of Emptiness. While the Harammins themselves were not in the path of the swarm, three other alien races were facing extinction: the Insects, the Logrians, and the Delphons. While the Delphons chose to stay and fight the oncoming swarm, the Insects and the Logrians packed up and left. Their course took them into Harammin space, where the billions of transplanted Insects began to push out the Harammins. Desperate, the Harammins at first attempted to solve the problem through the use of genetic engineering. However, their solution came in the form of a Delphon device, used to cause a star to go nova. The Harammins used the device to threaten both invading races to submit to their rule. Using their advanced technology, the Logrians constructed the Veil, a vast network of gravity generators, which hid the large O'Hara star cluster, including Harammin space, from any sort of detection or access by trapping outgoing stellar radiation inside the "sphere". The Forerunners, being attracted to starlight, passed by The Cluster without notice and were annihilated by the Delphons' final act of self-sacrifice (using the same nova-causing devices). Over the following millions of years, the Harammins have been slowly turning the other two races into their slaves, using their advanced technology and technical expertise to manipulate both races into eternal servitude. They have even wiped all memory of the former glory of their new slaves, forbidding them to dig into the past. Using the Logrians' most advanced piece of technology - the small supercomputers known as logrs (see Logris), the Harammins learned to grant themselves eternal life by storing the consciousness of a deceased Harammin on a logr and downloading it into a newly-grown body. This, essentially, stopped the evolution of the Harammins both as a species and as a society in its tracks. This so-called Immortal Quota turned into a small static group of eternal rulers, whose only goal is the preservation of the status quo. Only several tens of thousands of Harammins became a part of the Quota. The rest were also treated a servants, albeit of a higher status than either the Insects (warriors) or the Logrians (technicians).

However, the increase in the number of human ships appearing in their space have forced the Harammins to conclude that the humans will, eventually, discover them. Using the humans' own Interstar system (future form of Internet), the Harammins began to learn about the young race, discovering, to their alarm, that human technology has advanced to the point of being a threat to the Harammin dominance, whose scientific advancement halted after the creation of the Immortal Quota (indeed, it actually regressed). Using the Interstar, the Haramming began to anonymously purchase advanced military hardware (warships, power armor, servo-machines, etc.) from the black market, as well as Borderworld corporations. Using the more aggressive Insects as combat thralls, the Harammins have trained them to utilize human weapons of war. Locating a colonized world near their cluster, the Harammins launched an attack on the colony and quickly subjugated it, testing their new warriors. However, a human soldier managed to send out a warning message to the Confederacy of Suns fleet headquarters. Unfortunately, the Confederacy was in the middle of being dissolved, and the message got lost among others. In 3802, an ex-soldier was digging through the military archives of the late Confederacy and found the message. However, it was already too late, for the Harammins attacked shortly after, nearly taking Ellio, the former capital of the Confederacy. The soldier who found the message, along with several others, managed to get their hands on some mothballed military hardware and pushed the invaders from the planet. Over the course of what became known as the Seven Days War, large-scale battles raged in several systems. Eventually, however, those same soldiers managed to find and reactivate the Logris, an ancient hyper-advanced supercomputer made up of billions of logrs, and used it to find the location of the Harammin cluster. Destroying the gravity generators, the cluster was finally revealed to the rest of the galaxy for the first time in 3 million years. The final battle took place on the Harammin homeworld and resulted in a near-total annihilation of the blue-skinned race. The Logrians and the Insects were, finally, free. All members of the Immortal Quota were killed either during the human attack or by the vengeful Insects. Only one member managed to escape unharmed. A small population of the lower-caste Harammins are still living among the ruins of their homeworld.

For over seventy years, the surviving Harammin searched for any trace of lost technology of his race. Eventually, he found records of several planets where his people were conducting experiments in an attempt to create a bio-weapon to use against the invading Insects 3 million years ago. His goal was not only to find the means to exact revenge on the humans but also to regain his lost immortality. His attempts are described in the novel The Last of the Immortals.