First Contact

Nakteti was, again, like so often before, completely confused by the Terrans.

In the Unified Civilized Council areas, there were exactly three Tri-Vid stations to watch. An educational one, one to tell you how great it was that the Lanaktallans 'saved' you, and one for local news and that one reported on the mundane things.

Terran news was dizzying and confusing. One channel had two beings engaged in a near-violent verbal disagreement as to whether or not the Lanaktallans were at fault for their treatment of the other xenospecies in their area or if they were the victims of a not-yet revealed third party.

Another channel showed the massive forges at work, talking about such things as stocks and bonds, the need for laborers (A suited living being or even DAS could work in the Hate Anvils and Wrath Forges, but robotic construction equipment could not, even though Nakteti wasn't sure why), the massive shipyards need for workers and administrators and everything else. She had no idea one of the gas giants in the Sol System was entirely encased by a shipyard lattice that was capable of building and refitting millions of ships.

"Not since the Mar-gite War has the Terran Confederacy seen such a massive mobilization of troops" was a line repeated over and over. Curious, Nakteti looked up the Mar-gite War.

And was almost sick.

Nobody knew where they had come from. Silicate based, not carbon based, five limbs, an eye at the end of each limb, they were completely incompatible with everyone else. They didn't talk to anyone, just attacked, completely exterminating all life on the planet. They'd come across the vast gulf between the broken off 'stub' of the galactic arm and the galactic arm itself by the trillions but that was all anyone knew about them. Their ships were more biological and extruded than built, their weapons were focused particle waves, they didn't speak, they didn't communicate.

They only killed.

The war had lasted for nearly a century, with the Terran Confederacy taking hideous losses. Nearly 300 planets were completely planet-cracked and nearly a thousand depopulated.

There was no talk, no discussion. Even if a planet was silicate based they'd depopulate carbon life forms on another planet in the system. There was no co-existence. A single Mar-gite landing upon a silicate based world would rapidly multiply into the millions within days or weeks.

The Confederacy had been slow to act, the Confederate Congress arguing endlessly over the level of force needed while the military was forced to withdraw, planets to evacuate. Many beings felt that if enough systems were given up, the Mar-gite appetite would be slaked.

It was when video got out of what happened on a world that the Mar-gite took over that the Confederate Congress found itself on the receiving end of a riot.

The Mar-gite would literally 'eat' the carbon based life forms. Grab them, pull them tight against the body, and excrete enzymes to dissolve the carbon based life form and the pull the nutrients into their own body.

The carbon based life form was alive and aware till almost the end, neural tissue the last to be absorbed.

By that time over three hundred worlds had been taken. Billions of Terrans.

Nakteti watched, horrified, at the video documentation of the Terrans on New Terra charging the Congressional Guard, pulling them down, killing them, while the Terran Armed Forces just stood to the side and watched.

They'd lynched the entirety of the Terran Confederate Congress Human Delegation. Hanging from whatever was nearby and killing anyone who didn't run.

The riot had wracked the entire mega-city for two weeks before it burnt itself out.

Nakteti watched the rest of the documentary. How the long idle forges on a hundred different forge-worlds were reignited, how Terrans had gone from "eh, nobody wants to hurt us any more, we'll just wander around and have fun" to screaming for planet crackers and worse within, to Nakteti, moments.

The war had been brutal, but the tactic they had followed was odd to Nakteti.

The humans had attacked the worlds the Mar-gites had attacked first, then chased their progression while gathering on the borders of "Mar-gite Territory'. Heavily arming the first few worlds, then attacking from all sides, forcing the Mar-gite into smaller and small territory, killing everything in their way. They had looked into the Gulf between the galactic arm and the spur, found two star systems out there, and, well, the documentary didn't go much into it except for "Guarding against any reinforcements to the Mar-gites or any force pursuing them."

The rule of the day was: "So much as look at us funny, we'll genocide you and everyone who ever heard of you or might have seen your star in the sky" and they kept it up until the last Mar-gite ship, harried and damaged, was destroyed and the remains burnt into atoms. They scorched and planet-cracked every silicate world that so much as had Mar-gite drive trails in the system.

But that wasn't the end of the documentary. It focused on what came afterwards.

She knew she shouldn't have laughed, that she should have been horrified.

One of the Terran Descent Humans had stood up, stated that the military forces of the Terran Confederacy should be disbanded again, returned to peace status, that the threat was over and life could go back to normal. The being had oozed smugness, reminding people that the war was over, and it couldn't possibly happen again.

The human next to him, a Congressbeing from star cluster that had three planets that the population no longer even existed, had calmly stood up and asked to be recognized.

When the first turned to the second and sneeringly asked if he had a rebuttal, the second human had grabbed his chair and started beating the first human with it, even while the first human screamed for the second human to stop.

Nakteti couldn't stop laughing. She knew she shouldn't laugh, but it was just too funny.

She even rewound it a few times to laugh even harder at the sudden violence. The way it wasn't even telegraphed, the human just snatched up the chair and hit the other human with it without even changing expression.

She wasn't even horrified by the fact that all of the other Congressbeings had just sat and watched, not raising an outcry, not going to help the one being beaten. The meme "I should stop this, but..." was prominent with it, along with pictures of the chair swinging at the Congressbeing with the caption "I have a chair, your argument is invalid".

Finally, she managed to settle down, to stop giggling, before Major Carnight came rushing in to check on her.

The humans had maintained their vast military, which constantly patrolled all of Confederate space.

Now it was all pouring toward Lanaktallan space.

Hundreds of millions of beings were signing up to enter the military. Hundreds of millions more were returning to military life.

The sheer scope of it staggered Nakteti. That a civilization that seemed as if they didn't have a care in the world, surrounded by luxuries that Nakteti could only dream of, who would live for centuries, would suddenly rush off to fight in a war for beings they had never yet on the other side of the Great Gulf.

But what else startled her was how the news showed it all.

The fierce fighting on several worlds that had been hit with biological weapons. Tales of tragedy and heroism, or gallantry and defeat.

It was after a newscast showing a place called "Telkan" fighting against biological horrors that she realized that she had gone her entire life never hearing of a race that was less than 200 light years from her home world.

We were neighbors, and I never knew their names, Nakteti thought, turning off the Tri-Vid and walking out to the balcony.

They were back at New Mombasa, at the top of the hotel. She had paid for it herself this time, insisting on it.

There was another thunderstorm, complete with rain and wind, as she looked out over the city.

The universe is malevolent and will take everything you love from you and hurt you while it does it, she thought to herself, dialing down the protective field until she could feel the rain and wind on her fur. Nobody is coming to help you, help yourself or die screaming.

She shivered, partly from the cold and partly from what she had seen over the last few months.

You went out into the galaxy, looking for friends, and instead you found viruses, Precursor Machines, and aliens who did nothing but try to destroy you at best, eat you at worst, she thought to the humans of the city before her. You wanted friends so badly you pack-bonded with animals while you were still in caves, you uplifted species to be friends, you created digital intelligence in your own image to be friends with.

And the universe responded by trying to kill you, she thought.

Thunder rumbled hard enough to rattle her bones as she moved over to the chair next to an auto-dispenser table. She tabbed up an alcoholic drink, then sat in the rain, wearing only modesty clothing, sipping on her drink and looking out at the city.

Nakteti thought about her own people, who had invented jump-drive only to be conquered by the Lanaktallans within a year of making their first jump-drive journey. Of course, they'd arrived in a system already being exploited by the Lanaktallans and the Lanaktallan Unified Military Council had followed them home with a fleet of a hundred ships.

The humans, by the time they ever left their system, had already fought a war between the colonies and their home planet twice. There were warships already lurking around the system, she thought to herself. The universe seeks balance in all things.

Perhaps the Terrans are a balance to the Lanaktallans? Over a hundred million years of oppression and servitude may be shattered by primates who were watching lightning from caves fifty thousand years ago? she sipped at her drink, looking at the city.

Humans could be slow to move, but once they started moving, they were like an avalanche.

She had seen the stuffy of herself every day, seen children holding them, staring at her with wide eyes, heard her own voice telling children that she loved them.

On one news program a child had been pulled from a river where a hoverbus had crashed, newly orphaned, and a rescue worker had handed the child a stuffy version of Nakteti who immediately had hugged the human child and said "I love you" right on camera. She had watched as the crying child had hugged back so tightly it took Nakteti's breath away to see it.

Nakteti shivered again. Not from fear, but from the memory of the prepubescent primate's eyes.

She'd watched an ancient movie, where a human male had survived a plane crash and washed up on an island, where he had pack-bonded with a round synthetic ball with a handprint made into a smiley face on it.

They'd pack-bond with a rock if the loneliness got intense enough, she thought to herself. They would scratch eyes into the rock and hold conversations with it.

She sat, sipping her drink, watching the thunder, lightning, wind and rain, feeling the rumble of the thunder in her bones, feeling the cold wetness on her fur, considering what she'd learned.

The idea that the Lanaktallan were so hilariously outclassed by everything about the Terran Confederacy was so alien that Nakteti could understand why the Lanaktallan couldn't even comprehend it.

For over a hundred million years they had ruled over everything they saw. They had won the Precursor War and that was good enough to never bother changing again.

Now the Terrans, whom to the Lanaktallan were nothing more than upstarts in need of 'gentling', were coming down on the Lanaktallan sphere of influence with enough firepower to level anything in their paths.

She was pretty sure that the Lanaktallans had no idea just how badly they were going to lose.

Nakteti put her chin in one of her catching hands, holding her drink with a gripping hand, and stared at the city beyond her.

Do the Terrans understand how insane, how unlikely, how impossible*, what is happening really is? This is like leaving a food storage unit full of food unplugged for a few weeks, coming back, and having a completely new creature jump out of the unit with a laser gun and shoot you in the face followed by a few billion of its friends,* she thought to herself. She knew, right now, without a doubt, someone on the planet was having a celebration with friends and tried to remember the last celebration she had been a part of.

She couldn't think of one.

Nakteti had thought a lot about Lanaktallan culture since she had been to the Valley of the Kings. No celebrations, no holidays, not mythos, just a simple "work, consume, breed, obey" ethos that filled every single day.

Empty lives, she thought to herself. Terrans would call those lives empty and not understand them.

She finished her drink, setting it on the table and watching it dissolve, reclaimed by the machine. She dialed up another one, letting the dispenser know she wanted to watch it being crafted over fifteen seconds.

It's like magic, she thought, watching as the 'glass' was built from the bottom up and then liquid started filling it before the liquid was given a light spin to mix it and the fruit was created above the liquid to plop in due to the gravity.

It fascinated her to watch. Not just the action, but that the food dispenser would be programmed to let you watch it create something.

An advertisement across the way, a huge Tri-Vid screen that showed advertisements showed two sweating Terran men grappling, wearing white wigs, elaborate outfits, attempting to pin or force the other one to submit. The caption read: "See the Election of the King of Burgerland reenactment!"

She cocked her head, looking at it.

The Terrans knew that it was unlikely that the depicted struggle was actually how ancient Terrans elected officials, but they loved the idea.

That's obviously bullshit, but it's cool, so I believe it, she heard a Terran voice say in her memories.

We have no history. It was taken from us and we didn't even know, her own voice answered.

Nakteti leaned back, holding the drink in her hand. Idly, she pinged her datalink and got a com-link number. She set her drink on the table, got up, and went and got dressed, coming back out and turning the protective field up high enough to push the rain and wind away.

She made a call.

The human who answered looked surprised to see her. It took him a minute to put it together, then he rubbed his eyes and obviously sat up, the picture auto-rotating with him.

"Um, Captain Nahk-tethee?" he said.

Nakteti nodded slowly. "Yes, human Natchez."

"How did you get my private com-link number?" The human asked, looking surprised.

"Diplomatic authority," Nakteti said. "If you are not interested in what I'm about to offer you, then I can look up the next human of your profession."

She watched the entire thought process run through his brain in a second.

"Not at all, Captain. How can I help you?" he asked.

"You are a visual media creator. Specifically, movies, correct?" Nakteti asked. The human nodded and Nakteti bared her teeth to imitate a human smile. "Excellent. I have a job for you."

The human frowned. "What?"

"I have, in my possession, all of the logs from when my ship was attacked by the Precursor that started this whole war. I want you to do a dramatization of my people's part in it all," Nakteti said. She gave the human smile again. "I, personally, will be funding all of it."

Nakteti typed a number into the display's interface.

"Is that enough to wake you up, Natchez Human?" she asked.

His eyes widened then his face went carefully neutral. "It definitely has my attention."

"Good. I will get a hold of you shortly. I will be clearing you to see the video logs of what happened so that you can do a drama of what happened," Nakteti said.

"Not a documentary?" The human asked.

Nakteti shook her head. "No. Drama it up. I'll approve of it or disapprove of it, but punch it up really good. I want an exciting story of love, betrayal, and danger, culminating in my people making it to Terran space to be rescued."

The human nodded slowly. "Based on a true story, type, not dramatization of real events type?"

Nakteti smiled. "Yes. I will call you in three days time, give you time to look at it all and you can tell me if you can do this project."

The human smiled back. "Then I will see you in three days. I'm awake now, so I'll start looking at the video records."

The human vanished and Nakteti leaned back, picking up her drink and sipping at it.

Her people needed stories. Needed a mythos of their own.

It had to start somewhere.

Nobody is coming to help you, so you best carry a gun to Tombstone if yer goin' to down, little dorlin, went through her head as she sipped the drink.

The Lanaktallan had eliminated her people's history.

Someone had to start her people's history again.

It was up to her people.

You have spoken, thus you have volunteered, she heard in her mind a quote from someplace she couldn't remember.

Thunder rumbled and Nakteti stared at the night skyline of the city.