First Contact

Her name was Dreams of Something More and it was not just a random assortment of letters that her creche nannies pulled from a hat. She had seen the devestation that interstellar wars could cause. As part of her diplomatic training, before she had been named, she had walked worlds completely sterilized of all life, wore a protective suit on worlds that had been turned into a toxic cesspit, and stared at worlds that even the atmosphere had been riven away.

Some were from the Conflict of Many Queens, some were from the Mar-gite War, others were worlds that the humans had ripped apart just to deny other humans those worlds, and some were from the Mantid-Terran War.

She had explored a destroyed battleship in her youth, where Terran troops still held tight to weapon systems, grinning with feral grimaces of rage, their bodies mummified by the vacuum of space, where a commander still sat in his combat cradle, the ship orbited a destroyed world.

She dreamed of a galaxy, or at least the Orion-Cygnus Arm Spur, at peace without the need for the Hate Anvils of Mars or the Wrath Forges of Mercury. She dreamed of races getting along with one another, working together toward a sparkling future she could see just beyond her reach.

Her name was also her curse. She knew she would never see a galaxy at peace. That it was impossible.

Unless the Terrans brought peace with the point of a bayonet and the muzzle of a gun.

She had to admit, humans fascinated her. Not just their bewildering civilization, not just their capacity for violence, but the way they applied that violence. She had been in the presence of a Speaker twice (neither experiences she would care to repeat) and in the presence of a Warrior Mantid a half dozen times (each time was terrible in her estimations), and while they were capable of violence, and in the case of the Warrior, bred for violence, they didn't apply it the same way that humans did.

Which meant she wasn't able to sleep.

It was that damnable 117 and his simulation that had him hopping up and down with glee.

Dreams had looked at the Mosizlak to see if the Terran had any opinion. For a split second, just a moment, she saw it in his eyes and could feel it with her antenna.

Raw hateful wrath-filled glee.

Just for a second. Maybe not even a second.

But she had seen it.

Worse, she had felt it. That feeling like she had picked up an object, expecting to find a warm smooth stone, and instead had discovered razor sharp edges and needle-pointed spikes.

It was hours later and she still could feel where the Mosizlak had cut her deep inside. She could feel the bruising inside from the gathered warborgs that had, for a moment, oozed pleasure at the sight of world after world, stellar body after stellar body, just vanishing from the map.

Humans still hated.

Fiercely.

Humans were still full of wrath.

Burning.

Everyone knew they had more than planet-crackers in their arsenals.

The Mar-gite war had proved that fact.

Dreams sighed as she remembered her history lessons on the Mar-gite War. How there had been no way to end the war short of genocide.

Just one side willing to talk or end hostilities didn't work. Both sides had to be willing. The Mar-gite didn't communicate, didn't follow any known ethics or morals, didn't explain anything. They went out of their way to attack the worlds of other species.

There had been a small sprinkle of stars between the Cygnus-Orion Spur and the nearest arm of the galaxy. Just a handful about thirty to sixty light years from one another, almost a line of them.

Now there wasn't.

The middle three stars were just gone and nobody was sure how. No supernova, no nova, just... gone.

The Terrans just shrugged and ignored the question.

Dreams got up and moved over to her chair, sitting down and relaxing. She picked up the datapad and examined the data points. It wasn't even the war data, it was the points and questions that had come up during the discussion.

The Lanaktallan empire had huge cracks in it.

The Vuknaraans were angry, according to Fights, over what had been done to their diplomat. The nanites, biological rather than microscopic robots, had been found and examined. While Fights had pointed the nanites out the Vuknaraan doctors and scientists were the ones who had removed them. Within minutes of being removed from the body the nanites corrupted and decomposed into a basic proteins that were nearly undetectable from normal waste proteins in the Vuknaraan body.

Dreams got up and walked back and forth, feeling Mr. Rings watch her from the carefully hand-made ceramic tree, snapping her fingers and rubbing her bladearms together to try to calm herself down.

The Vuknaraan were furious, but it was a resigned, defeated anger.

They literally didn't know what they could do about it. It was the Unified Military Fleet and the Unified Executor Council that protected their worlds. They had even abandoned some of their colonies in the last several millennia, most of their factory worlds and manufacturing facilities were abandoned.

They'd even begun to abandon their cities, preferring to dwell in the forests they were letting reclaim their worlds.

To top it off, they were, to use their words, a peaceful people and they had no idea what kind of outlet they should use for their anger. Their big idea was to take their complaints to the Unified Civilized Species Council and demand that the Lanaktallans 'answer for their actions' and allowing the council to decide on the Lanaktallans punishment.

Fraud Corp has investigated itself and found no instance of fraud, went through her mind, a line from a movie she had seen recently. A Terran comedy involving vaguely bumbling Terran lawyers trying to escape corporate hit squads and deal with lawfare from the corporation while exposing a huge fraud.

Sighing, she got dressed and motioned at Rack and Pinion to follow her. Mr. Rings had climbed in one of the boles of the ceramic tree and gone to sleep, dreaming happy octopi dreams while she got dressed. She wore, underneath her jacket and abdomen wrap, concealed body armor as well as a psychic disruptor, putting the knife and chain into a decorated satchel.

She used the hover-disc when she reached the street, slowly moving toward the edges of the capital city of the Vaknaraan people's capital world.

She noticed that the streets were empty. Half of the traffic lights didn't come on until she was almost up on them and even then they blinked for a moment or two in confusion before just letting her go by. They went back off by the time she was half a block away. The majority of the buildings were dark and had the feeling of abandonment.

Halfway out of the city she saw ivy growing over buildings, cracks in the street with grasses poking up through the cracks, trees planted between the sidewalk and road that had shattered road and sidewalk both with their roots.

A mile from the edge of the city it looked as if it had been abandoned for decades.

She had seen this before, but never on a world where people lived. She'd seen buildings just covered in ivy and vines, the windows shattered or cracked by roots and vines, the building itself slightly warped from the weight of the vegetation. She'd seen roads and mag-lev lines covered in vegetation before, the struts collapsed or broken, the rails twisted apart, abandoned vehicles in lots and trains on or beside the tracks. She'd seen a city in that condition before.

She'd seen it on planets where the dominant species had been wiped out by bioweapons.

It depressed her to see. Here and there she could see faint graffiti from decades gone by, the colors washed out and muted by sun and weather and time.

It started raining, drizzling, and she queried her implant link at the same time as she activated the weather shielding on the hover disk.

There was no connection to the planetary network and she was still within the old borders of the city.

It was just abandoned.

She honestly wondered if the weather control systems worked any longer.

"Is there anything near us?" Dreams asked her escorts.

A panel opened up on Pinion's back and an antenna array deployed. It swept the surroundings a few times then retracted.

"No. Nothing more than small mammalian vermin, some large insects, and a few omnivore mammals and avians," Pinion rumbled. "No power, no electronic emissions, no sign of technological advancement outside of the plascrete buildings."

Rack's array finished scanning and vanished back into the panel in his back. "While there are multiple satellites in reach, all of them are offline. Most are on solar and battery backup, their reactors are dead, but there's one or two still functioning."

Dreams shook her head, the rain hissing on the broken and shattered pavenment.

"If you were scouting this world for military purposes, what would be your decisions?" Dreams asked.

"A dying world, inhabited by a dying race. They failed the Genomic Alteration Filter and without assistance will go extinct within a few hundred years," Pinion said.

"This world, except for its location, would have no strategic military value. It's not even worth planet-cracking," Rack added. "Any easily accessible resources will have been already extracted."

"And the people?" Dreams asked. The wind moaned through the abandoned and empty buildings.

They were both silent for a long time. "They are a few generations from return to primitiveness. If their genome is locked then they will dwindle away, if their genome is still capable of being altered by evolutionary pressures than they will undoubtedly either evolve into a non-sapient form or somehow become reinvigorated," Pinion said. "With geological instability missing and the old continental fault-lines no longer active, it is doubtful that any new sentient life will have access to resources to assist their social and cultural evolution."

Dreams sighed, watching the leaves shiver from the rain falling from the sky.

"They are considered a fully Civilized race by the Unified Species Council," she said softly.

"Without assistance, they will be gone forever from the galaxy soon," Rack rumbled. "They will need a crash program to save their people."

The only sound for a long time was the wind, the rain, and the humming of the hover-disc.

At the edge of the city, as fuzzy as it was, was a vast forest. The trees loomed up hundreds of feet tall, assisted by the low gravity and deep soil.

"Life forms approaching, targeting systems online, automatic defenses online," Rack said.

"Keep your guns holstered, boys," Dreams said. She made sure that the hover-disc wouldn't react as she slowly drifted to a stop between two large trees.

The Vuknaraan that approached were almost unrecongizable from the ones she had met in the city, in the Senate. Their fur was dyed, they wore bark and woven plant fiber clothing, and they all carried spears.

"What do you here?" one asked, her implant switching modes to decipher their language.

"I am Dreams of Something More, a diplomat from TerraSol and the Terran Confederacy of Aligned Systems," Dreams said, pulling her donorcycle chain and switchblade out.

There was murmuring between the Vuknaraan and Dreams waited.

"Who metal things?" the same one asked.

"My escorts to ensure no violence is done to me. Their names are Rack and Pinion," Dreams said carefully. "They are Terran inside their metal."

Again, whispering. Her implant was picking up a lot of their body language, the diplomatic protocol software working overtime. She could see that the one speaking wasn't the leader but rather the leader's voice. She could see bits and pieces of shiny technology held on thin braided cords. The chief/leader had a robot head on a rope hanging off his neck and a sword made from ground down and engraved armaglass.

Barely out of the city and their people have already returned to primitivism, she thought to herself. Their people are dying. Not by the sword, not from the gun, but from inside.

Their hearts have been stolen, she heard the line from a movie.

"Why come?" the voice of the chief asked.

"I wanted to see what was outside of the city," Dreams said. "I had no intent of violating any taboos or holy laws."

More discussion.

"You must go. Back to the bad place. Only the people may be here," the speaker said.

All of the Vuknaraan lowered their spears, two put tension on bowstrings.

As I suspected, the gold mantis thought to herself. She gave a stilted but formal bow and slowly turned around the hover-disc.

Back into the city, she felt like was in an eVR historical documentary sim. Block by block the city showed more life, but the streets were still empty. Just more lights on, just traffic signals that worked, less and less plant life.

When she got back she checked on Mr. Rings, touched base with all of her diplomatic mission, then settled down in the sand bowl, folding her legs beneath her.

What she had seen worried her.

Even the Terrans could be beaten with that type of warfare.

Gentling they call it, she thought to herself. More like murder by slow suffocation.