First Contact

Chapter Ninety-Nine (Nakteti)

The day was bright and clear, heat pounding down to be reflected by the golden sands surrounding them. The little wheeled ground-car, with no doors, not top, just belts to hold the driver and passengers inside of it, made growling noises as Major Carnight drove it along a winding road.

Nakteti could see shards of bluish-green glass and shivered.

Lossglass she thought to herself, using the Terran name for it. How they ever figured out how to recover a planet's biosphere from a glassing, I will never understand.

"So, explain to me where we are going," Nakteti said.

"You said you wanted to see our ancient human ruins, so I'm driving you out to see some of the oldest ones that are still left," Major Carnight said.

"I have always wanted to come here," A female Terran in the back said, her hair whipping around her face from the wind the vehicle's velocity caused. She was wearing adaptive camouflage and had a magack rifle in her hands with goggles over her eyes like everyone else in the little 'Jeep" did. "Things just kept coming up."

"Yeah, it gets like that," The other passenger, a male Terran, said. He was looking at the surroundings, but to Nakteti it felt more menacing, more sharp edged, than just looking at the surroundings.

She still couldn't believe that suddenly she was important enough to rate even more bodyguards. There were six of the giant black Mechaneks running ahead, beside, and behind the vehicle, their feet sending up puffs of sand as they ran silently.

Sonic baffling, she thought to herself, turning away from the Mechaneks and the sand to stare out the windshield at more sand.

Finally the vehicle turned the corner, around a large cliff, and it all came into sight. A massive valley in the sandstone, some of the sandstone coated with a thin layer of lossglass. Ahead were pillars, some fallen, some still standing; giant pyramids; buildings and statues carved from solid rock.

Standing guard were fierce looking armors, with elaborate head dresses and carrying staffs that crackled with energy.

Major Carnight stopped the vehicle and got out. "We walk from here. They don't want vehicles profaning this valley."

"What is this place?" Nakteti asked as she got out.

"The Valley of the Kings, where an ancient kingdom once buried their dead. There's ancient legends of warpgates, but nobody's found any actual evidence despite this being one of the better places to put them before the Loss. The magnetic field back then would have supported a warpgate quite easily," one of the Mechaneks said softly. "The battles fought here were so legendary even great religious figures once fought in these sands."

Nakteti looked at the architecture around her as she slowly walked with the others. She knew they were walking slowly because of her stride. Human strides were roughly a meter, hers were half that.

Watching historical videos and taking part in historical eVR's had given Nakteti a certain awe of the human stride.

She had seen recordings of something called "The Olympic Games" which were divided into four categories. 'Natural' which required a genescan, 'Biomod' which only allowed certain genetic modifications and bio-engineered tissues, 'Cyber' which allowed and required certain cybernetic parts, and lastly: Unlimited, where there were no restrictions.

It was the 'Natural' that intrigued her. The idea of so many different nations, so many different planets now, all competing in a two month long series of events was just dazzling to her.

She had watched something called 'The Marathon', a 42.195 kilometers (26.219 mile) race where the athlete bellowed out "God Save the Mantid Queen for We Won't" at the end of it, had been stunning to watch. She knew she was 1.25 meters high. That meant the entire race was 33,750 of her body lengths. How fast they had run that competition had been a thing of awe for her to watch.

Watching those human athletes run that race had been fascinating and horrifying.

One hour and fifty-two point three one minutes to run that course.

Nakteti had ridden in vehicles that traveled slower than that.

She knew that the human stride, their ability to run distances that were an incomprehensible feat to anyone else, was critical in what had fashioned humans.

She had discovered that the record for running a thousand miles was nine days, 20 hours. That human soldiers were required to run in full gear for miles, even with modern technology.

The Mechaneks surrounding her, when they had biological unmodified bodies, had been required to run mile after mile until they could run 3.5 miles in full gear and still fight at the end of it. If one of her people had been required to do that, their hearts would have given out before they had traveled a mile.

She discovered that humans had the "Lunar Mile", an event where a human wore goggles to protect the eyes, noseplugs, and ran a mile across the vacuum of their moon as some kind of weird bragging right.

Every soldier around her had the Lunar Mile under their belt.

Which made her painfully aware of just how short her stride was as they walked into the valley.

Their abilities to eat and drink as they ran or walked was weird to her. She had watched 'Primitivism Reenactments' of hunting, where humans would just walk after an animal to either capture or kill it. She had watched the male turn around, and walking backwards, urinate, then turn back around and keep walking.

Toward the end she had felt bad for the animal. No matter how far it ran the human just walked up while it was eating or trying to sleep. Over and over and over, until the creature just gave up.

But humans never did.

She was learning a lot about her hosts, about the people who had been moving her people to a planet that she had purchased, who had helped them set up the colony.

Now she had wanted to see ancient human ruins.

Large, was the biggest thing that came to mind. It made sense to her, a large people, the Terrans liked to impress one another with how large something else was. The 'marathon' was large, the 'Lunar Mile' was large, and everything they built was large.

When she saw the great pyramids of stone she stopped and stared.

They're so huge, was the first thing that came to mind. They had damage to them. Weather, time, and the patina of bluish-green glass from having been exposed to the glassing, which their sheer size and what they had been made of helped them survive.

"Those are tombs?" Nakteti asked, staring.

"To keep the great Priest Kings placated. We don't know that much any more, but it was a combination of respect and fear that made their people build these vast tombs to imprison their dead God-Kings, called Pharaohs," one of the Mechaneks, Gunnery Sergeant Bowman answered. "They laid curses on the tombs, which slowly took the lives of all who desecrated them through terrible rotting diseases."

"Don't forget that sometimes the mummies of the Pharaoh's guard would come to life and kill those who stole from the tomb," The female Terran, Lieutenant Krikov added.

"Never proven," the Mechanek said.

Nakteti just stared at the huge pyramids, the massive statues, as the Terrans started bickering around her about whether or not mummies actually came to life and attacked people, whether or not they could turn water to blood, or summon swarms of locusts, or call forth sandstorms that they devoured entire kingdoms with.

They all argued about mummies, curses, Gods, possibly warp gates and alien invasions/slavery, religious wars, a dead sea being parted, how purrbois were holy icons, and more as Nakteti stared in wonder at everything around her.

Because she was a xenodiplomat the fierce looking guards let her, and her alone, into one of the giant pyramids, two of the fierce looking guards, a Terran body with the head of a black canine, following her after warning her not to speak.

She looked at the artwork on the walls, the golden treasures, the jars containing everything from spices and grain to gold and organs. The place felt ancient in a way that she couldn't describe afterwards, and the golden sarcophagus holding the mortal remains of ancient Terran kings were strangely frightening.

They felt like they were judging her ability to lead her people.

As she left she twisted her hands on the grasping stick, thinking about what she had seen.

These structures were built with muscle. No graviton, no anti-grav, just muscle, round sticks, mud, and a whip.

She stood just outside the tomb, staring at her Terrans. The six Mechaneks, all men and women that had been 'killed' or volunteered to be full conversion cyborgs. The three others. Two of them 'bioborgs', their bodily organs replaced by vat-grown tissue designed for combat, the last Major Carnight, who was apparently about as close as someone in the Terran military got to 'Pure Strain Human' and was still in service.

She could hear them loudly discussing whether or not a mummified priest could breathe a cloud of bees on an unbeliever.

They were waving their hands and arms, their body language aggressive, but she had been around humans long enough to know that things weren't about to get violent, they were all fully engaged in the discussion and were bringing their natural human aggressiveness into the discussion.

Nakteti moved up and stood with them. The conversation trailed off with an "well, I think they could" and they all looked at her.

"Did you find what you were looking for?" Major Carnight asked, kneeling down in front of her.

Nakteti nodded slowly. "I believe so. This is an ancient place and I understand why they do not want it defiled."

"This place speaks to some people," The Mechanek Gunnery Sergeant said softly. "My father took me here when I was nine so I could know how even the Mantid could not erase my people. I knelt on one knee with a bowed head, alone but the Medjay, before the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Khufu and knew I was born to be a Marine. Felt his eyes upon me even beyond death and heard his wisdom in my soul."

Nakteti nodded again, bringing out her water bottle and taking a long drink.

"You can feel every one of the fifteen-thousand years upon this place," the bioborg male said.

Nakteti spit out her water. "What?"

The bioborg male repeated himself.

Nakteti looked around her, at what felt like ruins a hundred million years old.

"They're only fifteen thousand years old?" she stared at the humans. "But it was built with muscle power, mud, sticks, and whips!"

They all nodded.

"My people were industrious," Gunnery Sergeant Bowman said. He swept his hands out. "Here we buried our great Pharaohs and Priest Kings with their servants to watch over us from the Afterlife."

"Fifteen thousand years ago my people had been enslaved by the Lanaktallan!" she blurted.

The Marine looked at her and suddenly those blue eyes seemed cold. "And we will teach you how to make them regret that."

A cold breeze swept over Nakteti, stirring the sand at her feet. It sounded like whispers, cold whispers, to her for a moment. Her datalink flash ERROR for a second before it cleared up.

She looked at the humans and understood again, an epiphany that matched that one from the night where bunnies had made her almost hysterical.

It felt so ancient because it mattered to the humans. Even with barely known history wiped out by wars and disasters, this place still mattered to the humans. A thousand generations had gone by and Gunnery Sergeant Bowman still heard his ancestors speaking to him.

Nakteti was silent the walk back to the little Jeep, on the ride back, thinking about what she had learned.

Her people had been like almost everyone else. They cooperated, they built what was best for all, they spent time improving cooperation and sharing.

While her people were being enslaved by the Lanaktallan, the humans, with water, sand, sticks, muscle, and whips, had built stone structures that had survived a near hit from glassing. A society still using Bronze had built an edifice that people came to see, came to commune with, even after they had lost almost everything about the people who had built them.

She thought about her own people. Her history class had mainly focused on how lucky her people were that the Lanaktallan had arrived to stop them from destroying themselves soon after they had built their first jumpcore and made their first jumpdrive journey.

She tried to think if her people had ever built such things.

She didn't know.

Why didn't she know?

When she returned to her new hotel room she sat quietly, keeping the lights dimmed, as she thought about it. She ate, chewing mechanically, and thought about it. She bathed herself, rubbing the foam until she was nothing but a mass of bubbles, and thought about it.

She knew her people had discovered technology too quickly. Were lucky the Lanaktallans had arrived.

But what else had they done?

TerraSol's history was insane, crazed. They didn't know truth from legend, worse, they didn't care. She'd heard it repeated often: "That's obviously bullshit but it's cool so I choose to believe it."

But hers... hers was...

Gone?

How? How had she never noticed before? How had her people let it happen?

"I knelt before him..." echoed in her head, a paraphrase of the massive Warborg who even now was guarding her.

The Lanaktallan would remind her that such a place was a waste of resources. The gold, the stored grain, the time and energy put into building such a monument, was wasteful in a finite universe.

Yet Gunnery Sergeant Bowman had lost his mortal body by rushing into a battle-damaged reactor room and pulling six people from the wreckage and shut down the reactors before the battleship could explode. It had destroyed his genecode, and he had chosen to become a Mechanek. He had saved thousands of his fellow shipmates in an action that prevented something that, as a space vessel Captain, Nakteti secretly feared. He was what was known as 'The Living Dead Borgs'.

He had knelt before a ruler 15,000 years dead, who had 'ordered' him to become a Marine, and he had saved thousands.

Nakteti paced back and forth in her room.

What had her people built? What had happened to their great works?

She turned on the Tri-Vid and flipped through channels.

There, a bloody gorey gruesome charge up a beach where unarmored Terrans climbed over their own dead to break the back of an enemy nation.

There, Terrans in damaged armor fought in the tunnels beneath Hateful Mars against Mantids two times their size, matching bladearms able to score warsteel with chrome steel tools.

There, a small Terran girl ran from a burning city, stripped naked, covered in burns.

There, red skinned warriors riding great feathered lizards wielding bows fought warriors wearing blue and yellow on horseback with pistols and swords.

There, a Treana'ad tasted an ice cream cone.

There, a ship Captain ordered his engines to overload on a deserted ship so he could destroy a meteor that was going to destroy a world.

There, a hologram addressed a world.

They had history. She knew that if she got one of the Terrans they could name every single one of those images she had seen.

Where was her people's history?

She refused to believe that they didn't have one. She refused to believe what she had been taught, that once her people had banded together they had lived modestly.

Humans could walk, could run, for days. They never stopped, they never gave up, they just kept going and going. No matter what, they just kept on coming. No matter how far even history ran, they would simply keep on walking. They could run across an entire continent in two months. They could run through a million years of technology because they did. not. stop. They didn't sit back and go 'well, this is good enough' because humans just kept on going. Kept pounding their footsteps into the dirt.

Their history was their unstopping footsteps.

Where was hers?

She clenched her teeth, knowing the answer to what had happened to her people's history.

The Lanaktallans.

we'll teach you to make them regret that..

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