If you’re planning to be somewhere for a long time you tend to plan for it. Oftentimes, things that you intended to do for a short while might go awry. A one year mission could turn into a multiple decade quagmire. I’m not speaking from experience, but you could say I know a guy.
Such was the situation that I found the Mane in their camp. You see the thing was, when you’re doing a real long term project? The very first thing you set up is sanitation.
And by that I mean after you establish security. It really wasn’t so hard when you were the only group in the system, and the locals, though menacing looking in size and stature, were just large puppies. I did worry about the animals that followed the land whales, but that’s about it. The damn things just gave me the creeps. And this is coming from a nigh immortal artificial intelligence. Roh had explained that they were some sort of non newtonian fluid based being which threw me for a couple days.
So anyway back to the real problem. They had set up a temporary camp here, after they’d already spent the time to do some actual long term planning and implementation. Roh had shown me a little smidgen of an old map and although the actual Volk and Mane had the assets once, they’d since beaten the Mane to a pulp and just told them they would be camping for a while.
Camping is great. I hear that it’s several different kinds of therapeutic. It’s good to be out in the wild. The human brain is designed to enjoy pastoral scenes like those that you would find while camping. Mane and Volk physiology probably wasn’t too far off. I could imagine lizards doing the same thing out on their home planets, really enjoying everything there and then wanting to pass on the same reverence for nature to their offspring.
This was not anything like that. I was certain that the Mane had a clean streak, because I got to see a few of them specifically cleaning their tents thoroughly. They spend a lot of time working to maintain some sort of presence. Was their cleanliness some sort of last vestiges of their need for autonomy? Perhaps. If I was stuck far from home, I might be driven to act out against my oppressors.
At the same time, there was a lot of individuality in the tent city. Many of the Mane had painted scenes dotting their once white or metallic colored tents. I’d hoped to spend a lot of time looking at these scenes, but like a good villain, I stayed brooding in my lair. It wasn’t optimal.
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Life really wasn’t too bad when you considered it. I got the thing I wanted, which was the mission, but I still felt like I was missing something. The outside? No, I had my VR world, which thankfully connected to the girls. Freedom? Yeah probably. I missed it.
Having to hide? That was a bit of a drag.
Hiding with friends though, that made it okay.
Think of it like trying to cook a dish. Sure, you want to start with fresh ingredients, in this case, my friends, but then you’d really want to get to your mise en place. Kiernan, Stevie and I felt like we were in our mise en place time now. We’d gotten the crew together, we’d prepped the food and now all we needed to do was figure out what the heck the person across the way was ordering. We probably needed a waiter. Perhaps this metaphor has gotten out of hand, or perhaps it just needs a bit more time in the oven. Either way, I want to make sure that it was fully cooked.
There was a lot of talk when I was a junior officer about why we fight. Fresh off my two rounds at a tech startup, everything was all about the benjamins. In the Army, it was about the man and woman next to you. In my case, the woman, woman, and nonbinary alien AI robot next to me. My adopted family and in Stevies case, boss.
“Hama and his people have been here for years. Do we have any idea how long a Mane lifespan is? For that matter, Roh how long do your people last?”
“Thy words…long, longer than most,” Roh said. He spent his days drawing fractal mandalas on the ground and when he ran out of space, sweeping them away. There wasn’t a lot of ground for him to cover here in this small dug out cave.
He’d explained it as something the Elders had told them to do. When asked, they hadn’t deigned to have a name for their race, just having the Ucit call them elders.
“I hope that I live long enough to see some of my people colonize this planet,” I said, “Assuming we can work out the negotiations between ourselves and whomever has set up shop in this corner of the Milky way.”
Roh continued to work his fractal magic. I was trying to see if there was some deeper meaning behind his work, because it was pretty even as he made little organic compound looking hexagons. At one point, he’d mapped out the local star systems and given his names for them, all the way out to Delta Eridani. Now this was very useful in a long term perspective but for right now, it was little more than icing on the first contact cake.