Behold: Humanity!: Total War, page 23
"Put your thumb here, sir," the Terran said.
U'urmo'ot shivered for a moment then jerkily pressed his thumb. The dataslate beeped and U'urmo'ot made a noise of fear as the dataslate showed his face, his thumbprint, and his identity.
U'urmo'ot - Lanaktallan - Unified Council Witness -VERIFIED
"May I go?" U'urmo'ot asked. Being this close to the Terran frightened him.
"You have to witness the mail being taken off the ship and then being loaded back up and sign that we loaded it all up," the Terran said.
U'urmo'ot made a noise of distress but stayed where he was.
"Pardon Mister U'urmo'ot, Terrans make him nervous and he is afraid that you will punish him for the actions of his people before our planet surrendered," Ast'Lar said, staring up at the Terran as she pressed her own thumb against the dataslate.
"If you would like to wait in your office, Mister U'urmo'ot, and watch from the window, I understand," the Terran said.
"I would rather hide in my closet," U'urmo'ot said quietly.
"You have to be able to see us move the mail, sir," the Terran said.
"May I watch through a drone from my closet?" U'urmo'ot asked.
The Terran sighed and looked at Ast'Lar who nodded. "Very well, sir. I can make that accommodation."
"Thank you, Terran," U'urmo'ot said and galloped away. Personally, he was proud of himself for not letting go of his patty until he was safely in the bathroom.
"He seems nice," the Terran said conversationally.
"He bribed his way into this posting as Most High so he could stand on the dock and fish," Ast'Lar said, shaking her head. "He is not a brave being and offered to leave, but he is the least objectionable of all the Lanaktallan who were here before we surrendered."
"Makes sense," the Terran said. "Well, we better get to it."
"Indeed," Ast'Lar said.
U'urmo'ot watched through the drone, wishing he was down at the dock practicing his fishing, as hover-pallet after hover-pallet was taken off the ship, the bags counted, and then the bags of outgoing mail were stacked onto the ship. When it was all loaded up U'urmo'ot reluctantly moved out and pressed his thumb on the dataslate before galloping away.
As the ship sealed back up the Terran turned to Ast'Lar.
"A question," he asked.
"Yes?" Ast'Lar said, smiling.
"Have your people recovered from the medications they were putting in your food and water?" the Terran asked.
"Yes, it was difficult for us. The return of our fur was hard also," Ast'Lar admitted. She looked back at the office, where U'urmo'ot was trotting out with a floppy hat, a vest with fishing gear attached, and a pole over his shoulder. "Although, I think, the sickness was worse for him."
"Oh?" the Terran asked.
"He has no family, not as we do. He is alone, yet they made him stay here to act as the witness to this mail. He is intently lonely," Ast'Lar said. "I feel for him and I wonder about his people."
She watched the Lanaktallan gallop down the street.
"He is a prisoner here just as much as our people are a prisoner of you."
-----
DEAR: Uln'Var, Revered Mother
More N'Kar have arrived, taken prisoner by the Terrans. Some of them are being specially treated as they had the unfortunate experience of fighting against the humans, who ignored their fire to wade through and take the weapons away from them and yell at them until they cowered.
According to a Terran I spoke to, they were able to discover the worlds our people have been forced into guarding and are doing something called 'surgical strikes' to free our people.
This both shames and gladdens me.
The females are allowed to spend time with us now. Not much, overseen by the Terrans, but still, we spend time with one another. Many of them grow afraid and hide behind Terrans at odd times. The huge primates are a source of comfort to these females and I worry for them.
I have finished constructing a resort for them. I had to be careful with the designs, avoiding bright colors and lavish bedrooms.
I learned what a pleasure dome is.
It was frightening to find out. I had asked a Terran, who was relaxing and fishing near us, and I saw his eyes begin to burn. A cold amber filled them, then a red fire that seemed to not only fill his eyes but his very soul. He told me, in cold terms, what it was.
Despite the red fire in his eyes he did his best to comfort me at the thought of what the females have gone through. I asked him if I could join the Terrans in crushing the Lanaktallan, in obliterating their people from the universe. He told me it was forbidden, that we are to be considered non-belligerents.
I wish I were Terran sometimes, Revered Mother. To have the power to crush my enemies, to punish those who have wronged our people, to feel their flesh crushed beneath my fists, to pull the trigger and see their lives splatter onto the sand.
I now see a therapist for these feelings.
I wish I could come home, or home could come to me.
I wish the war was over.
I have included three pictures. One of the sunset, one of the sunrise, and one of Kle'Var and I sanding the beams of the boat we are building.
I love you and miss you, mother.
Respect and Honor: Del'Var, your male child.
-----
Del'Var, faithful and true male child
It is with joy I write to you that our planet has surrendered to the might of the Terran Confederacy. The Overseers have left the planet in accordance to the surrender agreement, although the Most High U'urmo'ot has remained to witness the mail exchange.
The Terrans are a fearsome but emotional people. When they heard the stories of what had happened to our people, the Terran military officer we surrendered to began to show amber in his eyes.
Things are changing, Del'Var. I cannot tell you how, lest someone who should not may read this, but great things are happening. Let us just say that you and the others will not be out of place when you return home, with a full pelt.
Remain faithful, my male child. Things may be dark now, but there are glimmers of light in the darkness. Your letters are a constant wonder. Your grandmother loves the pictures you send.
I love you, my child.
Mother
-----
MANTID FREE WORLDS
HOW many EPOWs?
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
TERRASOLMILINT
43,494,212 and counting.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
TREANA’AD HIVE WORLDS
My god, that's an entire species.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
AKLTAK GESTALT
What will you do with them?
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
TERRASOLMILINT
What else can I do with them? Keep moving them to the planet, give them medical care, and hopefully keep someone from planet-cracking their homeworld.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
TNVARU GESTALT
Are you going to move them?
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
TERRASOLMILINT
Eventually. I mean, now they’ve surrendered. It's a complete shitshow.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
RIGELLIAN SAURIAN COMPACT
How bad is their home planet?
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
TERRASOLMILINT
It's fucked. Not as bad as the Leebawians, but pretty bad. We're talking Elven Queen bad. The algae in the seas are dying and most of the fish are dead.
---NOTHING FOLLOWS---
MANTID FREE WORLDS
You'll fix it.
You always do.
BOSOM OF THE ENEMY
The Lanaktallan researcher had been known as Glu'ufo'ot less than a year ago. Relegated to a project that had returned no new answers to old questions, sunk deep into debt and poverty, and threatened with being purchased by a corporation. He had faced centuries of debt, poverty, and worse.
Then the human had arrived. Apparently killed by a one inch diameter durasteel bar through the abdomen, the human had been dropped off at the station as it was the closest one to where the human had been recovered.
The human had turned out not to be dead, merely in a 'medically induced coma' to heal 'major trauma' and had woken right before Glu'u and his compatriots would have dissected him.
Now Glu'u was on a place called "We're Still Here" in the stellar system the Terran Confederacy referred to as "Alpha Centauri B", and things had wildly changed in the last six months. Where before he had worn the sash and flank coverings of a scientist, he now wore tailored clothing, including a suit jacket and very very posh looking flank coverings. He had polished leather shoe coverings, polished to a mirror brightness. He wore an expensive timepiece on his left upper wrist, not because he needed to, but because he enjoyed the sheer luxury of it.
He also had two Terran assistants. One to manage his recreation time, his guest appearances, appointments, and research time. Another to ensure that he was comfortable in his dwelling, that his prepared meals were to his taste, his clothing was properly cleaned, and other esoteric things he had never had to concern himself with.
For the majority of his life his food had come from a food dispenser and he had worn paper clothing as he just applied ancient theories to ancient samples to result in ancient answers. Nobody had cared about what he did unless he found an anomaly.
Now, Glu'u was trotting up the highly polished white stone steps, to the large inlaid double-doors of an educational institution. To the Terrans, it was an ancient one, established nearly 10,000 years prior.
Which made Glu'u snort in amusement. The research space station he had been assigned to prior to his 'defection' had been lost for a million years and was estimated to be ten million years old.
To be honest, the Prokhor Zakharov University was a much more impressive place.
Rather than just rote recitation of facts and formula, students were encouraged to question "why" and "how" in regard to facts as well as to explore things already known for anything that had not yet been discovered.
It was much different than how Glu'u had grown up, had been educated. The facts were the facts and there was no reason to question how and why. No reason to examine how the facts came to be known as facts.
Glu'u trotted up to the elevator, nodding to the students, and rode up to the third floor. The elevator was comfortable, and even had pleasing tonal sequences the Terrans referred to as 'music', which made him tap one hoof in time with the song.
After a short trot down the hallway he opened the door and clattered across the polished floor to the lectern in front of the stepped seating. The class was full, not only of students, but of observers, researchers, scientists.
He pulled out paper rectangles and shuffled them before tapping the edges against the wooden surface of the lectern. He set the cards down, cleared his throat, and tapped the icon to bring up the first slide on the massive data-displays behind him.
"Good morning, class, and welcome to Primitive Non-Carbon Based Genomes. I am your instructor, Professor Glu'u Lanky. If you will examine the syllabus, we will go over what you can expect to explore during this Level 300 Genetic Science Class and the accompanying lab," he said.
Immediately everyone began taking notes and Glu'u smiled to himself.
Finally, after 200 years of research, study, and learning, he was able to teach.
Just like he had always wanted.
-----
Ru'ulmo'o sighed and pushed himself back from the computer display he had been examining. He appreciated that the Terran research corporation was willing to invest in such a wide series of displays to let him use all six eyes in a way that made reading data more comfortable.
Even Lanaktallan corporations rarely bothered with more than a single monitor for a researcher.
"You all right, Rule?" one of the Terrans asked, looking up from his work.
"My excitement at working with genomic samples that have never undergone manipulation is only exceeded by my frustration of the messiness of nature," Ru'ulmo'o sighed.
"What are you examining? Perhaps I can help," the Terran said, getting up and moving over next to Ru'ulmo'o. He looked down and shook his head. "Yeah, that one's a sticky one. We've been trying to crack that one forever."
Ru'ulmo'o reached into his pouch and withdrew some stimcud. He rather enjoyed it. It was from a place called Kentucky, a mixture of something called blue-grass, tobacco, and cannabis. He wadded it into his mouth and chewed with his back teeth, staring at the genome sequence as it slowly streamed by.
"It seems basic. An invading protein attacking the cell, but the fact that it is able to attack two unrelated genuses is odd, and that it would only attack those genuses is even stranger," Ru'ulmo'o said after a moment. "Only nature could produce such a thing."
"You don't think it was an old bioweapon?" his fellow researcher, Rwanta Tiklaki Brunt asked. When Ru'ulmo'o looked at him Rwanta shrugged. "Believe me, that's been a theory off and on for centuries."
"I thought so at first. It's too perfect, you know?" Ru'ulmo'o said. "It's clean, elegant, and efficient, attacks only those two genuses with a 100% lethality, has all vectors, survives outside the host as if its a standard airborne microorganism, and replicates explosively within those two genuses."
"I get it," Rwanta sat down in a chair, pulling out a pack of smokes and lighting one. Ru'ulmo'o found the scent pleasing. Terrans and Treana'ad both smoked, despite slight cultural stigma with doing so.
"But, after the latest rounds of tests and looking over the unadhered sequences, there's no doubt about it, it's natural," Ru'ulmo'o sighed. "Is it strange that part of me hoped I could swoop in and cure this and be instantly hailed as a hero by your people?"
Rwanta chuckled. "Every geneticist has that fantasy at times."
Ru'ulmo'o rubbed his middle eyes and looked up at the ceiling. "There's so much to do here. There's so many projects, so many questions that need answers, answers that need questions, and curiosities that need questions."
Rwanta tapped his ashes into the debris/trash collector. "I take it after a hundred million years of history it's all done where you're from."
Ru'ulmo'o snorted. "The leading scientific theory of my people is that all the questions that could possibly be asked and the answers to those questions were posed and provided nearly a hundred million years ago so there is no reason to ask new questions or look for new answers."
"And here I am working on examining the genome of an extinct species based on some viable DNA discovered in a preserved set of remains found in ice," Rwanta chuckled.
Ru'ulmo'o nodded. "To me, that's exciting. That sample would have never even reached us. It would have been determined to have been a standard early carbon based single celled organism and simply scanned and filed without ever examining it. You're asking where did it come from, why did it come from, what building blocks made it and why was it able to survive, all because you can."
"And we're paid," Rwanta said.
"Oh, yes, definitely because we're paid," Ru'ulmo'o nodded. He patted his cud pouch. "After years on that station doing nothing but going further in debt, the fact I'm paid to have lunch here in the facility is amazing. It's definitely nice to be paid. Getting paid is quite the novelty that I'm becoming accustomed to enjoying."
That made Rwanta chuckle.
Across the room the holoemitters spun up with a whine and a tall human female flickered into existence. She stared off into space for a moment as color started to fill her. Brown skin, shining bald head, chrome eyes, dressed in a lab-coat. She blinked and looked around, smiling.
"Sorry I'm late," she said. She held up one hand and bounced a ball made of swirling code in her hand. "SolNet is getting pretty hammered. They released a new season of Letmun Riddles and it's just crazy out there."
Ru'ulmo'o shook his head at the human habit of creating fiction. He'd watched a few of the 'movies' and while they were fascinating, he was still having a hard time coming to grips with how expending resources to make these 'films' somehow created more resources.
"So, were you able to get it?" Rwanta asked.
"Yup." She bounced the ball up and down on her palm a moment then tossed it into the middle of the room where it dissolved as the R&D mainframe grabbed the datapacket and decoded it. "Took a little bit of fast talking, but I was able to get it."
Ru'ulmo'o's crest curled with excitement. A rare genome to examine next to more modern ones. He pushed forward, saved his work, and brought up the new genome.
An extinct creature for Terra itself, lost when the planet was glassed. A sample had been found only a few months ago and everyone wanted a copy of the genome to examine.
What came up on his screen was a small warm blooded mammal of the rodent family. He rubbed all four hands together and brought up the artificial genome that was created to replace the small creature when the planet's biosphere was replaced. Comparing them he could see quite a few differences, small mistakes that rankled his senses.
"Excited, Rule?" Namini-893782 asked, leaning over his shoulder.
"Absolutely. The idea of creating artificial genomes to replace vital parts of the biosphere was a theory rejected by my own people's scientific organizations. This is all new to me. Both the recovery of a lost species, which is something my people never do, and examination of a synthetic species, another thing my people wouldn't bother doing," Ru'ulmo'o said.
"Well, then I'll let you get to work. Let me know if you need anything," Namini said, shaking her head.
She had to admit, she liked the guy. It had taken him a couple of months to get used to the fact he was allowed to ask questions and request resources, but once he had, he'd thrown himself into his work.
Ru'ulmo'o himself was busy comparing the artificial mouse to the original mouse, humming a song he'd heard and found particularly appealing.
The work in the Biosphere Recovery Project continued.
-----
Vu'uklu'u leaned back on the couch and puffed at the pipe he had in his mouth, looking smart in his custom tailored suit. The Terran female across from him was the height of Tri-Vid fashion, left mammary gland exposed, right thigh exposed, long hair that rustled and shifted as she moved and spoke, crackling arcs of electricity moving through it, slightly larger than normal cyber-eyes, and hover-high-heel shoes.
