First Contact

Dreams had spent the day talking to various Vuknaraan diplomats. Most of whom were trying to decide exactly how to ask the Unified Civilized Races Council for advice on how to approach the fact that one of their diplomats had been used in an attempt to assassinate the sitting diplomat of another species. She had asked a few questions, like what did they plan to do if they were told that nothing would happen or that a board of inquiry would be formed or a panel would be put together and the results would take years or decades to reach a conclusion.

The diplomats had all agreed with the idea of forming a committee to investigate if a panel should be formed to examine the evidence might be the best way to do things in order to not make waves.

Finally, just wanting to change the subject if nothing else, Dreams asked the politician that she was visiting what the status was of the primitives outside the city.

Since the primitives did not have system identification numbers then technically the primitives did not exist and thus they had no status.

To which Dreams just dropped the line of inquiry.

She had stayed up late with Speaks and Fights both, trying to understand everything, trying to look for any clues on who the power being the Lanaktallans might be.

Which is why she was sitting, in her favorite sim, idly stirring the currents of the creek with one bladearm while she watched the fish, run by their own VI, dart around in the water.

"The just isn't enough data," she mused to herself.

There was a slight feeling of amusement from Pinion, which made her look up, flicking her antenna somewhat irritably.

"What's so funny?" Dreams asked.

Pinion shifted slightly, making an amused noise. "Watching all of you go over all of that data without seeing the obvious."

Dreams sighed. Pinion was right. It didn't matter if she brought in Fights or Speaks, they were still Mantid, which meant they looked at things the same way.

"What is so obvious?" Dreams asked.

"First, an anecdote," Pinion said. Dreams made a 'go ahead' gesture and the massive war-borg continued. "A few decades back, during the Vagrant Belt Incident, I knew a mechanek that specialized in man-pack missile and rocket systems. He could thread a datalink controlled smart missile through a hab-complex hallway and out the far window to hit a hovercraft in mid-air, he was that good. Any type of rocket or missile he showed almost preternatural skill with."

Dreams watched as the massive cyborg held out his left hand with the palm up, showing various images of warborgs with missile systems firing them as well as the massive damage the missiles did.

"He was a terror with those missiles, to the point he could get the maximum use out of the minimum payloads," Pinion continued. "Now, one day he was killed by a rocket. Care to guess who fired it?"

Dreams thought for a moment. "The obvious answer is the enemy, or perhaps an incompetent third party, but as this is an anecdote that supposedly relates to the situation, I will assume that he fired it."

Pinion nodded. "Yes. There was a factory error on a lot number of his favorite missile, which he would fire, skip off the ground to alter the flight profile, and attack the enemy with. This error made it so the minimum stand-off distance, which prevents a missile from detonating right in front of the launcher, no longer functioned correctly."

"And he blew himself up," Dreams said.

Again, Pinion nodded. "Because he assumed he knew everything about the missile and when the update came he didn't bother to read it because there was nothing left for him to understand about that missile."

Dreams went to nibble on the end of her bladearm and instead summoned up a tray of treats to much on. She thought over the story for a bit, spearing small pieces of rolled fish and seaweed and dipping it in sauces. Finally she looked up at Pinion.

"All right, I am ready to hear what is so obvious to you," Dreams stated.

Pinion moved slowly through the eVR, covered by the Pacific Northwest Sasquatch hologram, moving through the thick ferns.

"Bioweapons and gene crackers are weapons, crafted from tools, and it is easy to forget that tools are dangerous," Pinion said, stopping between two trees. The moss hanging from them mostly hid him. "A knife is humanities oldest friend, right next to a club. Both the club and the knife are the reason we are what we are. We did not have bladearms or claws or big fangs, we had to master the knife and club to climb up the ranks of the food change," the massive warborg rumbled. "Every day, right now, there are a couple dozen humans who had died because they forgot the simple fact that for all of its usefulness, the knife is still a weapon. Humans die all the time acting as if a knife is a toy not a dangerous multi-function tool."

Pinion went silent and Dreams thought about what the big cyborg had said. She knew what the warborg was saying but it seemed almost impossible.

"Another thing to consider is a pair of fun facts," Rack suddenly said.

Dreams looked over at her guard. "All right."

"It takes a hundred and fifty pounds of force to break a human forearm," Rack said.

Dreams nodded. "The human forearm is an excellent defensive feature."

"It takes five pounds of force to collapse a windpipe," Rack finished.

Dreams stared at the fish while she considered what her two guards had told her. She disliked the assumption that the Lanaktallan were stupid and clumsy enough to mess up their own genome. It just felt like too easy of an answer that ignored the possibility of them being the catspaw in another's plans.

"Madame Ambassador, do you consent to a little more anecdotal sidetracks," Rack asked, moving forward and kneeling down next to her.

"If you think it will help," Dreams said.

"Pinion and I understand what you are grappling with," Rack said. He held out his left hand, palm up, and brought up a hologram of Mantid warrior class, in armor, with a heavy plasma rifle.

"Inertia dampening shields, a plasma rifle capable of melting stainless steel, able to run at thirty miles and hour for up to an hour with busts of speed up to fifty miles an hour. Multi-faceted eyes able to see across multiple spectrum, psychic abilities including the ability to create a blade-like focus of psychic energy. Body armor capable to handling 2.12 megawatt lasers in the high UV range. An engine of destruction, the will of the Queens, and the back upon which the entire Mantid Hive Empire was built upon," Rack said.

Dreams nodded, feeling slight revulsion at the sight of the warrior caste.

The hologram flickered to show a seated human eating jam out of a pot, dressed in torn jeans and a t-shirt, with a doofy smile on his face with an empty whiskey bottle next to him.

"Behold! Humanity!" Rack said dramatically.

Dreams giggled. "OK, I get it. It's viewpoint. There's no way the male eating jam could beat the warrior, so you never consider him to be the downfall of the Mantid."

Rack shook his head. "No, Madame Ambassador, there is a reason I used this picture."

The hologram flickered again to show a human male in Imperium of Rage armor, his face twisted with absolute fury, in the middle of tearing a warrior caste Mantid soldier in half with his armored hands.

"Same human," Rack said.

"Oh," Dreams said.

"Who rules a herd?" Pinion suddenly asked.

Dreams considered it. "Nobody. It moves by consensus. Herd creatures value conformity to the herd so that the loss of one does not negatively effect the herd."

Pinion shook his head, the eVR construct around it making it look like his 'beard' was swaying back and forth. "Not necessarily true."

A horse appeared in the middle of the clearing. A Terran Great Plains Equine. Fierce appearing, proud looking, a massive engine of bone, sinew, and muscle.

"A herd stallion. He's in charge. If he goes down, there's another to take his place," Pinion said. "He decides who, if anyone, breeds, where they go, when they go. He's also the one who usually fights."

The horse was replaced by a Lanaktallan. Only bigger. A lot bigger.

"This is doubled in size. It requires four times the food. It has eight times the mass," Pinion rumbled.

Next to the Lanaktallan a historical image of a Mantid Warrior appeared.

They were roughly the same size.

Both were suddenly clad in armor and carrying weapons.

"You've been wracking your brains trying to figure out how the Lanaktallan beat you. You, the Mantids, who defeated and devoured everyone you met except for humans and the Precursors. How could you lose to such a inept species?" Pinion said.

"Your people know one another's caste a glance. You know what they are capable of, how they think, what they do, and their place in society," Rack said. "But the Lanaktallan aren't you."

It was silent for a long moment during which Mr. Rings peeked out of a water filled bole, wondering what all the excitement had been about. It saw the two big holograms and ducked back into the bole.

"Behold, Humanity," Dreams said softly. "My people would miss the fact that the human is now powered by blood sugar overload making his cells rapid-fire for hours, that he had voluntarily imbibed an anesthetic and is still able to function, would miss that with a single movement that empty bottle would become a sharp edged weapon. We would wonder how the drunk human with a pot of jam in one hand and a broken whiskey bottle in the other had defeated a half dozen Warrior caste before being brought down."

Dreams shook her head. "He should be going into sugar-shock or be poisoned by the alcohol," she looked at the image of the same human in Imperium of Rage armor. "What you see is not what you get."

She brought up a plate of food again, knowing that she shouldn't be snacking so much, but she wanted the protein for brain food. She stirred the water with one bladearm, clicking her mandibles as she thought.

"The alterations to the Lanaktallan could be accidentally on purpose, with unmodified Lanaktallan really pulling the strings," Dreams said.

"Another side bar, Madam Ambassador," Rack said.

Dreams made another signal to go ahead.

"A wheeled ground effect vehicle is traveling toward a crowd at ninety miles per hour," Rack said, bringing up holograms, wiping away the Lanaktallan and the Warrior and replacing them with a fancy fast looking car heading toward a crowd. The crowd was suddenly labeled "Lanaktallan Population" and the car was labeled "Lanaktallan Culture" and the driver of the car was labeled "Directed Modification" as the car sped forward.

"OK, I can agree with this," Dreams said.

"The driver suddenly vanishes. What happens?" Rack asked, removing the driver from the video.

"The car hits the crowd anyway. Inertia," Dreams said, then groaned as she realized what Rack was alluding to. She slowly ran a bladearm through her mandiles to sharpen it then went back to stirring the water for a moment before lifting up droplets and looking at them.

"A Lanaktallan fears entropy, the complete depletion of resources. They've mined away entire gas-giants, stripped entire asteroid belts, strip-mined whole worlds," Dreams said. "They've ended up with a homeostasis with no reason to change. Just collecting resources, stockpiling them, and continuing on with a plan set down who knows how long ago because it works."

There was silence again.

"Except, one point, Madam Ambassador," Pinion added.

"What?"

"Where are all the resources?" Rack asked.

Dreams didn't know, and that bothered her.

------------------

"Which would be a violation of the Genetic Privacy Act among about a dozen other Confederate statutes," Fights said, crossing her blade-arms.

"We simply ask for consent," Dreams suggested.

"I'm not even sure that they can consent to something like that. You're talking about a complete genetic alteration. Removing intelligence unlocks, changing their size, changing their metabolism, changing their breeding cycle. You're talking about a complete rebuild of the being. They'd be better off if we took them to a Clone Worlds facility and just reskinned them," Fights said. "And that assumes that you can transfer their intellect to a new body since so far there is exactly one species that doesn't start to suffer problems with body-swapping."

Dreams sighed. "Can we save the Vuknaraan people?"

Fights nodded, reaching up and pushing on the brim of her cap to tilt it back slightly. "Yes. It will take five to ten generations but with steady incremental changes we can return them to as near as I can tell original genome."

Dreams sighed. "I have gone out and met a half dozen of the Vuknaraan. Speaks went out and met with several."

Fights signalled amusement. "He's really getting on your nerves, isn't he?"

Dreams nodded, sighing again. "I know it's his job, I know he's supposed to be the one who keeps me from self-aggrandizement and fits of narcissism, but it feels like he's deliberately out to just ruin my day."

Fights snickered. "I know he supposed to do this thing as his job but it feels like he's deliberately going out of his way to do his job," she said, mimicking Dreams.

That made Dreams laugh. "You are correct."

"You are under considerable stress. Are you sure we should continue this course of action?" Fights asked.

"Those other two species will be another set of data-points at minimum, we may even find information we desperately need. If nothing else, we should, personally, tell those species that the Terran Confederacy is not holding those species responsible for what their adjusted diplomats attempted to do to me," Dreams answered. She nibbled on the tip of her left bladearm, dulling it slightly.

"I agree. We need to hurry back. We're outside of the gestalt as well as have only been making reports via diplomatic torpedo. We need to let the Confederacy know where we're going to be so we can more updates on what is going on since the attempted assassination," Fights said. "We're right on the edge of just all following Sees down random paths."

"I'm starting to feel as if she could see more clearly through this than I am able to," Dreams said softly. "As the humans say: it's hard to remember your original goal was to drain the swamp when you are asshole deep in angry alligators and have lost your knife."

Fights snickered. "We can just go back after we drop off the other two patients and reassure their species."

Dreams shook her head. "We are upon a trail. Don't ask me how I know, I just know. If we go back, it'll have terrible consequences."

"And if we follow this trail?" Fights asked.

"It will have terrible consequences," Dreams said, shaking her head again. "Either way, there's going to be consequences, but I think it'll be fewer consequences if we follow this path."

She pointed at the sky. "Each of those two species hold keys to our mystery."

Fights nodded. "Are you still going with the theory that there is some other player behind the Lanaktallan, the theory that Speaks believes?"

Dreams shook her head again, nibbling on the point of her bladearm again. "Partially. But I'm starting to lean toward the fact that the man behind the curtain was a Lanaktalln who went out, got drunk, and is now looking around wondering who the man behind the curtain is."

Fights shrugged. "Do you still want to go out and meet with each of the Civilized Species before we go back?"

Dreams nodded slowly. "I think that might be for the best. I want to get a better look at the Civilized Species outside of the records."

"You know that we're effectively at war, right? That we're taking a pretty high risk," Fights said.

"Yes. But that risk may very well pay off great dividends if we can fracture the Lanaktallan alliance," Dreams said. She pointed at the sky again. "There's hundreds of trillions of Lanaktallans out there. They outnumber the Terran Descent Humans by ten, maybe even a hundred to one."

"You're worried about the Terrans 1% the Lanaktallans," Fights said.

Dreams shook her head. "No. I doubt the Terrans are going to be willing to kill trillions of children just to break the Lanaktallans."

"Then what are you so worried about?" Fights asked.

Dreams looked around herself at the comfortable palatial luxury room that Fights preferred to bring up on her eVR to relax with. She thought about it again, nibbling on the tip of her bladearm while she weighed all the information she possessed.

"I don't know. I've just got a vague feeling of dread that I can't shake. Just... something," Dreams admitted. She stopped nibbling on her bladearm and tapped the blunted tip against the hard-light representation of a glass tabletop. "To be honest, I'd rather die than be 'gentled', to be honest. Or to have my progeny gentled."

Fights nodded. "It's horrifying."

Dreams shook her head. "Now, imagine how the Terrans will react to someone attempting to gentle them."

Fights shuddered. "OK, that's definitely horrifying. They didn't react well to their own people trying to do the same thing in their history, who knows how they'll react if the Lanaktallan attempt it. That's probably what the feeling of dread you are suffering is from."

Dreams not only shook her head but flashed several icons to signify a negative. "No. It's not that. It's something I cannot put my finger on."

Fights just made a non-committal noise, just sitting still and staring out the window to the 'garden' beyond the inlaid glass doors.

"Then we'll follow your winding trail through this forest that we cannot see the trees for the forest or the forest for the trees," Fights said.

Dreams just nodded, sitting with Fights in silence

-----------------

The Vuknaraan homeworld dwindled on the screen as Dreams watched. The ship she was on and her escorts were preparing to make the jump to hyperspace.

In her room was only Mr. Rings, her two warborgs, and 117 with his Mosizlak escort.

"Did you get it?" Dreams asked the small green mantid, who was over fooling around with a broken comp-slate he'd brought with him from the planet.

117 flashed icons of success and assent.

"Is Speaks examining it?" Dreams asked, slowly petting Mr. Rings.

More flashing icons as 117 finally got the case open on the broken comp-slate.

Dreams sighed, watching 117 started examining the interior of the comp-slate, tapping various points to let his senses spread through the circuitry looking for the mechanical failure.

"Where did you get that?" Dreams asked, realizing that the design of the comp-slate was foreign.

117 flashed icons of primitiveness and sacred treasure.

"Tell me that you didn't steal it," Dreams said.

117 flashed icons of trade.

"All right. What's so important?" Dreams asked, wondering why a simple broken slate was so important to the tiny engineer.

117 flashed icons of extreme age.

"All right. Let me know if you find anything important on it," Dreams said. "Are you sure, though, that you got all of it."

Making a gesture of being put-upon 117 flashed a small animated image of a small green mantid shoving a bunch of stuff into a bag, checking other rooms and grabbing more stuff, even pulling boxes out from under dust and junk and then jamming the dust covered boxes, the junk, and the dust into the bag.

"All right, all right, I'm sorry, don't get all bent out of shape," Dreams said, spreading her hands to mollify the green engineer.

The new animated image was of a gold mantis trying to juggle a bunch of anvils with a dozen anvils piled on top of her. 117 didn't even look up as he replaced the battery, adjusted the current and voltage, and began cleaning the power leads.

"Thank you for understanding I'm under pressure," Dreams said. She gave a big sigh. "I know what you did is permissible, I know we're at war, but grabbing their databases just seems like picking on someone weaker than me."

117 flashed icons of people wandering off from an object and then a green mantid picking up the object, brushing dust off, and walking away with it.

The comp-slate made a noise and began booting up.

117 looked at Dreams, flashing an icon of smugness.

-----------------------

Speaks took off the headset and leaned back slightly.

The problem was, 117 had managed to pull so much data it was like trying to find specific molecules while floating in the dark depths of an ocean. Some of the data hadn't even been error checked in millennia, some files had been written and never even opened.

Speaks opened up his personal terminal, loading up a bunch of boring documentary holo-vids, and began tearing them apart. Hidden inside the holo-vids were programs pertaining to his actual profession. Programs he'd need to start categorizing the massive amount of data.

All the data in the world didn't help you if it was just one big pile of jumbled characters and numbers.

Once he reassembled his programs, he put back on the headset, spread his hands to bring up his virtual controls, and began directing his programs in collating the data 117 had liberated.

For Speaks it was nice to return to intelligence gathering.

He just had to remember to run the data in multiple ways to avoid the eternal intelligence agent problem of 'garbage in-garbage out'.

He wasn't looking for some file where a dozen Lanaktallans confessed to their evil plan and explained every single point of their evil plan. That was lazy work.

He needed to put together a picture of what the Vuknaraan had realized, when they had realized, and what conclusions they had drawn from the information and evidence.

Humming to himself in pleasure, Speaks began to adjust his data array sorters.

Somewhere, in all of this data, had to be more breadcrumbs. The trick was to recognize them as breadcrumbs and to follow them where they led, not where he wanted to them to lead.