---Loneliness---
---[13 years] BF (Before Fluffy)---
The galaxy… is vast!
It contains fourteen billion terrestrial planets, of those, half are lifebearing, of those, one in a hundred are currently host to a permanent sapient population, of those, only a little over thirty thousand are cradleworlds of sapient species, of those, one… is a deathworld.
Lightyears separate stars! The size and quantity of objects that can move through the void without being detected is immense!
This was a lesson my polity, the Galactic Union, learned hard… all too recently!
Around [20 years] ago we discovered that our society had been cohabiting the galaxy with another domain…
This wasn’t the normal First Contact situation, where we’d find a species bound to one planet, maybe with a few extrasolar colonies!
They had a territory that already made them the most numerous single species in the galaxy.
Hundreds of planets and 1.7 TRILLION souls!
And they’d been hiding… right under our eyes and, yet, in the last place we’d look for them!
On deathworlds!
Worlds where the gravity is high enough to crush our silicate bones!
Worlds where wildfires rage!
Worlds where winds whip and storms howl!
Worlds where the plants are locked in a deathgame with eachother, greedily monopolising every last nutrient and ray of sunshine that they can!
Worlds where even the herbivores are ready to kill, unprovoked, because they have to be!
Worlds where predators stalk and venomous creatures lie coiled and waiting!
Worlds where a single microbe would be enough to lay waste to the ecosystem of an entire gardenworld!
Worlds where the very crust fractures and chafes against itself, roiling out streams of lava across the land, flattening buildings with earthquakes, washing away coastal towns with great waves!
Worlds where the suns stream a constant barrage of lethal radiation to crash against powerful magnetospheres, only just able to hold them at bay but still letting through enough to bathe the surface in mutagenic rays!
And what had these deathworlders to say of our gardenworlds? The appropriate, sane places for life and sapience to develop and inhabit!?
‘Unfit for settlement’! The selfsame thing we had declared of their species’ chosen expansion grounds!
Their complaints?; sun too weak, not tectonically active enough, atmosphere too thin, climate too stable, ecosystem not dynamic, crop growth too calorie poor, gravity too low! Could never support settlement, could never produce sapients!
We hadn’t found the deathworlders hiding in our midst and they hadn’t found us surrounding them because neither of us were looking in the right places!
And the worst part? They had spent centuries… screaming into the void, begging to be found, pleading for anyone to tell them they weren’t alone!
They had found life, deathworlds are not deadworlds, but no sapience.
In frustration, they uplifted their companion animals, built AIs, resurrected long dead cousin species… unsatisfied with their lot of loneliness… they changed it! If the universe wouldn’t give them company, they would make it!
Deathworlds have always terrified gardenworlders. The stories that come back with the few survivors are the stuff of nightmare.
Deathworld sapients have been a monster of myth, for longer than there are surviving records. Hellforged bodies, hellforged minds, hellforged intelligence and hellforged malice... stalking you… the thought is enough to make the most grizzled veterans in the galaxy quail and cower.
It was less than [two months], after news of the discovery broke, that the GU Parliament declared a war of annihilation against the Terrans.
Deathworlders couldn’t be reasoned with, deathworlders couldn’t be placated, deathworlders would not stop until they had brought death to us all, they said.
750 trillion souls marched to war against 1.7 trillion… and were utterly routed!
We were millennia ahead of them, technologically; they didn’t have nanotech, their computing was a fraction as powerful as ours, they were still dying at the end of their natural lifespan, they lacked regenerative medicine, they didn’t have FTL coms, didn’t have FTL tracking or targeting, they didn’t even have proper translators! Despite having thousands of languages they relied, instead, on a culture of polyglottalism!
In the face of all that, they humiliated us.
The casualty disparity was immense. Hundreds of us died for every one of them we killed. When we sent elite units, composed of some of the very few hypercarnivorous sapients, their ferocity paled in comparison to that of deathworlders! When we tried to make use of our tech edge they would reverse-engineer it, our millennia of engineering, by the very next time we fought them! When we spun up the engines of our industry, theirs spun up faster! On the rare occasions that we would capture one alive, they would tear through the containments we had assembled as if they were made of tinfoil and proceed to rampage through our ranks! Terran children and pets laid waste to battalions when we tried to take their worlds with ground forces! We attempted to glass their planets and they stopped us, they always stopped us, like they knew what we were thinking before we thought it!
Almost none of the Terran casualties were planetside, over 99% were voidside… that was my domain… fresh out of Officer Training, at [16 years] old, I took to the stars in a starfighter.
R’qali are some of the only sapients that have the instincts for [dogfighting] and… we are undoubtedly the best… or we were…
Human fighters outstripped us to the point that precognition seemed the only plausible explanation. In the year that I served, I didn’t manage to shoot down a single one of them but… unlike nine tenths of my classmates… I survived!
I watched and retreated with the GU forces as the Terrans pushed us back and back, taking and occupying planet after planet.
We wept for the poor souls lost to Terran occupation… the barbarism, the carnage, the atrocities, the brutalities... The… care? The… empathy? The kindness?
Video after video after testimonial after undeniable piece of evidence came from those occupied worlds!
In war, the Terrans had been every bit the monsters we thought they would be… and so much worse.
But, in conquest, Terrans in white clothes with red symbols on brought food, medicine, blankets, tents! They brought all the things they would need to tend to the homeless, the hungry, the sick, the cold.
They taught us the word ‘humanitarian’! They taught us the depth of compassion that must flourish in you when your home is hell itself! They taught us that we were wrong about them… They were such a lonely species for so long and, when they finally found fellow beings to offer a hand of friendship, we recoiled in horror… and tried to exterminate them!
We were the monsters!
After [seven years] of war, after 20 trillion (2.7%) GU dead and only 70 billion (4%) Terran dead, we capitulated. We surrendered. We invited a Terran delegation to the GU Parliament to discuss the terms of our surrender. The best we were hoping for was that the Terrans would declare themselves our overlords and force us to give them… everything we had to give, to repay them for the heartache we had caused.
The galaxy watched, with baited breath, as the broadcast was made of the peace conference.
Into the Parliament, strode the United Terran Coalition’s representatitve, backed by four bodyguards.
It was such a strange sight to see Terrans in their people’s formalwear! We were used to images of them in battle-armour and, as of late, white and red uniforms. It drove home again that these were people, not monsters.
She sat… and what followed was the most furious dressing down of a room full of powerful people that likely ever has or ever will occur. ‘Xenophobia’, ‘genocide’, ‘bigotry’, ‘war crime’, ‘crime against peace’ and ‘fucking’ were all words and concepts introduced to the nondeathworld galaxy, that day.
When the speaker, bravely, asked if the Terrans intended to seize control of the GU and turn it into their own expanded territory she scoffed and answered that they weren’t ‘orcs’ and they weren’t ‘imperialists’, two more new words.
Their insistence that they aren’t and don’t do any of these things is marred slightly by the fact that they’re the only ones with words for them!
With great care and demonstrating more [backbone] than I’m sure 99.9% of the gardenworlders in the galaxy would have been able to, the speaker asked: “If you don’t want to rule us… what would be adequate recompense for this blooddebt?”
The Terran thought for a long while before answering “We don’t want anyone else to die… enough of us… and CHRIST enough of you, have died!... You made us slaughter more than ten times our total population… just to survive! You can atone by first telling us that you’re sorry then showing us that you’re sorry! You can make this up to us by treating us as equals! You can make this up to us by ensuring that this never happens again! The next time you discover beings that frighten you, we’ll be here to make sure you extend the olive branch first, and then don’t bludgeon them with it! We can forget about ‘blooddebts’ and focus on healing and transforming things so that nothing like this is ever possible again!”
Over the coming [months], the Terrans took their seat in the Parliament and negotiations on reparations began.
The GU gave a formal apology for the slaughter… and so did the UTC… which no one was expecting.
The Office of Deathworld Relations was established to search for new deathworld sapients and mediate with the ones already known. It was scrupulously staffed with 50% Terrans and 50% gardenworlders.
Against their protests, the Terrans were given exclusive settlement rights to all the galaxy’s hundreds of thousands of deathworlds.
It was a hollow gesture. They weren’t really ours to give. We may control the space around them but those planets were so hostile to us that we never would have been able to develop them ourselves. ‘Like giving water to a fish’ was the analogy the Terrans used. It got the point across, after some translation struggles.
Stolen novel; please report.
They, rightfully also pointed out that, if they settled all these worlds, any future deathworlders would be ‘left out in the cold’. So, unbidden, they announced a regimen that saw a portion of deathworlds left unsettled, for any future deathworlders, and ensured the preservation of any local ecosystem for worlds they did settle.
We’ve shared technology, innovations, medicine, philosophy, law and we’ve both learned so much! The results have been better than anyone could have hoped!
And… yet, it’s been 14 years since the peace, and while hostilities have not resumed… the Terrans describe the current state of affairs with words like ‘apartheid’ and ‘cold war’.
Separated by planetary classification, the gardenworlders and new deathworlders have barely mixed at all! There are fewer than a million nonTerrans, living permanently, across all their settlement worlds and the number of Terrans who’ve taken to the stars, among nonTerrans, currently sits at around the same. Terrans have taken their seat in the Parliament but scrupulously avoid voting on anything that doesn’t directly affect them.
We need more! More integration! More participation! More innovation-spurring cultural exchange! There’s so much to learn from deathworlds and deathworlders!
Deathworld research has yielded uncountable new improvements to the galaxy’s quality of life but, deathworlds being deathworlds and deathworlders being so rare and guarded, in wider space, there have been numerous instances of researchers being sent to deathworlds without a Terran because none could be found. The results were predictable.
That’s why, mere [months] ago, the GU declared that a Terran escort was obligatory, on deathworld expeditions and requested the Office of Deathworld Relations to draw up requirements for a qualification that will come into effect in the next few years.
That being done all that was required was someone to negotiate the establishment of this course and agree to be captain of the ship that would be the first test case for this new Terran Security Officer position; those would both be me… Tcakqaal, 27th Daughter of Highspire Peak… who's currently stood on a shuttle descending to hell itself, the home of death, Earth.
“Ma’am, Sha’anza has been making objection about regulation 17.4, it’s making her… nervous.”
I flap, irritably. “We can’t ban pets if we want Terrans and we can’t restrict the kinds of pet they're allowed if we want them happy! It stays as is!”
I look at the pretty male, holding a holopad with clear concern plastered on his face.
“Remind me of your name, Soldier?”
I don’t need to guess that he’s a soldier. Though… definitely too young to have fought.
“It’s Qorak, Captain… your Clanmother hired me as your secretary and personal assistant shortly before the Bright Plume departed…”
I chitter at that “Did she now(?) The old woman does so like to play matchmaker(!) Listen, Qorak, I’m sure you’ll make some woman very happy when you agree to lifebond, one day, but… it won’t be me! Is that understood?”
His face is unreadable as he says “Perfectly, Ma’am.”
I avoid asking why a secretary would be on a surface shuttle to spare the boy any further embarrassment.
The shuttle door cracks and begins extending out to form a ramp, allowing the thick, soupy Terran atmosphere inside. It reveals the roof of the, 1500m tall, Reception of NonTerran Dignitaries building, located in a megalopolis on an island off of one of Earth’s landmasses.
An armoured Terran strides up the ramp, blocking my egress, gun slung at his side. If someone asked me to define ‘overkill’…
He glances between me and my new secretary for a few moments before settling on me “You are Lady Tcakqaal? 27th Daughter of Highspire Peak?”
“‘Captain’, yes.” I answer.
“Do you have a gravitic compensator and an aerial microbe denial field equipped and engaged?” he says, without apology.
I gesture to them strung on a sash, unnaturally draped across my chest. He looks at them a moment before seeming satisfied.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to enclose them in a tamperproof case, we’ve had some instances of gardenworlders accidentally disabling personal welfare devices recently and the results weren’t pleasant, this is now policy. The case will be removed before you reboard. Do I have your permission to do that?”
I give a Terran nod and he clips a transparent case around my devices. Akaros! It feels sturdy enough to survive a bomb blast!
That done, I’m shown across the roof, to a lift which takes me to the 169th floor, where my appointment is.
I walk up to the door of Ambassadors Jeanne 'Blitz' Miyazaki, the selfsame woman who stormed into the GU Parliament and berated the representatives like fledgelings, all those years ago, and Ez1026r583A 'Ezra'.
---later---
I drum my talons against the desk perch that the ambassadors have so graciously had provided. It’s unusual that I’m here alone, Terrans only do diplomacy from paired couple to paired couple. It wasn’t always that way, it was apparently a habit they only picked up after leaving their cradleworld, precontact, and it has become a policy since… but I’m unpaired… and the only qualified person who was willing to take this job… so they’re making an allowance.
“I know… that the skills required… would require turning out a galactic arm, to find experts on… in gardenworld populations… but the Office of Deathworld Relations assured me that finding these experts, on Earth, would be a trivial matter.” I say, cautiously.
The mechanical man fixes his eyes on me and says, in a perfectly level voice “Captain Tcakqaal, as my wife explained; it isn’t a matter of finding instructors, it’s volunteers that are necessary.” a pause “None have come forward.”
“There are tens of billions of people on this planet!” I exclaim, losing composure “None?!”
Ambassador Miyazaki turns her eyes to me from the window “Diplomats can shake hands… Ma’am… governments can issue apologies… but the people out there…” she gestures out of the window “…we can’t make them forgive and forget! The fact is, they don’t trust nonTerrans after your catastrophic mishandling of our First Contact. Almost every single person on this planet, lost someone to the GU’s attempted genocide. Many of them don’t believe you sincerely changed your minds about us and think that, rather, you just wanted us to stop slaughtering you by the trillion! And, if I may be so bold, the wording you had us use was… offputting!”
“‘Offputting’? How?”
She takes her holopad out and reads “…4 year course at the end of which you will be serving under a R’qali Captain who has nothing but the utmost respect for Terrans and the restraint they showed during their occupations of the First Contact War…” she tosses it onto the desk.
“That’s offputting… it sounds like you’re still thinking of us as monsters.”
I splutter “H-h-how!? How can you have got that impression from that wording!? I do have nothing but respect for Terrans! Certainly, I hated you as I watched all my squadmates fall to your prowess during the war but… when I saw the videos! I understood! You weren’t monsters! You were lonely! You had reached out in friendship and we responded with war! I came here in a ship with a brand new, Terran modelled, AI…”
“I’m certain you didn’t.” interrupts the Terran AI, correctly. GU law won’t allow fully sentient AI, so it had to be modified to a state of semisentience. The only reason this rule doesn’t apply to Terrans is because no one’s been brave enough to bring it up, knowing what the answer would be.
I continue “…I feed my crew with deathworld origin crops! I’ve spent the last [5 months] neck deep in researching your culture and history to be able to connect with this prospect, whoever they were. I’m here to sponsor a Terran Security Officer and hire them to my employ! How could I give you the impression that I think Terrans are monsters?!”
Ambassador ‘Ezra’ answers “Human beings are highly perceptive and sensitive of context, Captain. This is precisely why the GU has passed this law. Often what is not said is more glaring to them than what is. You need to understand that they don’t see their behaviour during our occupations as ‘restraint’. That would imply that they really wanted to run amok, pillage, burn, loot, cannibalise but were stopping themselves through force of will. This is not so. They cared for those whose worlds they occupied because that was what they wanted to do. Admiring their 'restraint' is still fearing their prowess, not appreciating their Humanity. You're just admiring the fact that they're not using their prowess.”
Ambassador Miyazaki smiles at her husband “Exactly, sweetheart! No one wants to work for a Captain who seems to think that they’re a monster ‘restraining’ themself!” she thinks for a moment before turning her focus back to me “Even if they are. Even if you think that! Though, I don’t know why you’d volunteer to be the test case captain if you did! Plus… if you want a Terran… you can’t treat them as just ‘a Terran’, you know? We’re not a monolith and no one wants to feel like they’re only valuable for what they are rather than who they are! If you want them to save lives, you need to make them feel like you trust them with your life! If you want their loyalty, you need them to feel like they have yours! If you treat them as just the 'ship’s Terran', you’ll never earn their trust. They need to feel like they can invite you to parties, discuss nonsense with you, you need to be approachable! Not just a Terran-wrangler!”
Frustrated, I ask “So what do you suggest?”
She chuckles “You could always meet some Terrans(?) Go out and get to know some people(!) Offer them a job once they’ve warmed up to you(!)”
She’s mocking me and it feels infuriating.
“You know what?!” I shriek “Perhaps, I will! I need to be ‘approachable’, afterall!”
I make for the door and Ambassador Miyazaki is frantically trying to call me back. She knocks a glass off the desk with gesticulation, it shatters. Titan! It was made of stronger silicate glass than my bones… and it shattered! From a [0.9m] drop! It wasn’t even full! It’s a good demonstration of why exactly I need the gravitic compensator.
Ambassador ‘Ezra’ says “Captain, this is most inadvisable. With the level of antigardenworlder sentiment on Earth we would never suggest leaving the building without a bodyguard.” almost sounding like he’s going to express an emotion other than serene calm, for a moment.
I turn, fixing my four eyes on the warm woman and the cold man. Affecting a single Terran laugh, I say “Hah! You two tell me I need to trust this prospect with my life and then you tell me to approach them with a bodyguard!? ‘Oh, yes(!) I trust you completely(!) Never mind the [215cm] of armed and armoured deathworlder behind me(!)’ I’m going and I’m going alone! If you want to stop me, do so!”
They know they can’t, it would breach every diplomatic protocol to detain me here, even for my safety. My stupid decision has no obstacles.
I stride out of the room to the lift, I descend, I walk through the ground floor reception area, the receptionist wants to stop me, I stride past his desk out the door… I breathe in the air of a deathworld city… I continue…
I walk past the historic palace that once, centuries ago, housed the emperors and empresses of a deathworld, maritime empire. I stride past that empire’s parliament building, I cross a river, I pass an enormous monorail terminus.
Occasionally, I stop to talk to one of the lumbering, deathworlder giants, all of whom are fixing me with the bemused expression of a father who’s child has suddenly started expressing an interest in kwarat hunting!
None of them give me the answer I want. None of them are interested, none of them are interested in helping me find someone who is interested. I walk on.
This would be much easier if I could fly but, even with the gravitic compensator, that’s not possible in 2.1GS G.
Eventually, I find myself at a deadend. I turn around to find my way barred by three adolescent Terrans with cruelty in their eyes. The same cruelty that we imagined was there in all of them when we declared our war of annihilation.
“What're you doing on Earth, then?” asks the, apparently, leader.
“Oh well, you see, I’m a diplomat, sent to recruit a Terran to serve as a test case for a new rank which could help to foster a goldenage of prosperity in the cooperation between gardenworlders and deathwo…”
“No you ain’t!” interrupts the one on the right.
“Yeah, that’s right! You’re here to kill people ain’t you!? Like you killed my dad!”
“And my grandpa!” adds the lead one.
“And my sister!” adds the one on the left.
“No… truly! I’ve never killed anyone, even though I served in the War!”
“Ah… so you tried to kill us and couldn’t!” smiles the lead, cruelty white hot.
I stumble backwards and trip, landing on the ground.
The leader reaches down and lifts the sash off me, over my head.
“These look valuable!” he says, admiring my devices through the perspex.
“No! Wait! Stop! You’ll kill me if you take those!”
He smiles, either not believing or not caring.
Then, faster than I can resolve… he’s bleeding. I look left… there’s a fourth boy, who wasn’t here before. He’s holding a length of wood that looks like it had been discarded on the ground.
The next thirty seconds are a blur as this new boy flashes between the others. I can’t actually see him swing his improvised weapon but I can infer that he is from the sickening crunches and screams of agony from the other three.
As they turn to run the new boy grasps my sash and wrenches it from the leader’s hand. The leader hesitates but sees the copper haired boy’s menacing feint of his stick and the look in his eyes before seeming to decide it isn’t worth it.
My assailants vanquished, the boy drops his bludgeon, turns to me and holds out his hand.
“You alright? You didn’t notice ’em followin’ you?”
I hesitate for a moment before taking his hand.
He pulls me up and hands me back my sash.
“Thank you! I owe you my life!!!” I say breathlessly.
“’snothin’… Those guys are arseholes! I know ’em from school! Saw ’em followin’ you from across the street and knew they was gonna do somethin’ stupid!”
I look up into his eyes, like emeralds, and say “…How would you like a job?”
---[4 months] AF (After Fluffy)---
[206cm] of hellforged body, hellforged mind, hellforged intelligence and hellforged compassion stands [50cm] to my right, cooing over my egg in its incubator.
“How long’s it been?” he asks, with heartwarming smile still fixed on Tcakak.
“Oh… I’d say about [4 months].” I respond, amused.
His face turns to confusion “Oh, really? Isn’t that a long time? Secreta…”
“If you are about to compare R’qali to secretarybirds, or any other nonsapient deathworld avian, don’t!” I interrupt, still mirthful.
He shrugs and returns his gaze to her, thinking.
After a long time he says “Soooo… is that where you were when I went to a’Teksia 3?”
I chitter “Just so, dear boy! I was recovering from laying. I enforced a strict ‘do not disturb’ for two days and emerged to find two notifications ‘Victor Taylor engaged with a’Teksian mirkbeast’ followed by ‘Victor Taylor hospitalised’ and I ran to the medical room, where you were sleeping, thinking you’d been savaged by 300kg of dangerous local fauna, rather than savaged by your own loneliness(!)”
He chuckles at that.
“How is the new Triple M working out? Hasiakh?” I ask, remembering the [6m] of scarlet reptilian who recently took residence in Triple M after passing the Fluffy Test.
“Hassi? Hassi’s great! Hassi so sassy! We love her! She’s a big fan of the Cuddle Puddle but says it makes her a bit too energetic to sleep!”
“You’re not apprehensive about sharing your living space with a venomous serpentoid?”
He laughs “Definitely took a little gettin’ used to but we’re all friends now. Plus Cookie says her venom only hurts about as much as a bee sting, so…”
“Wait! She bit Dhawan!? How did that happen!?”
His smiling gaze still fixed on my egg, he responds “Not mine to divulge, I’m afraid, you’ll have to ask ’em next time you come to Triple M!”
I stare, disconcerted, for a few moments before I’m satisfied that, if he’s not concerned, it’s not something I need to be concerned about.
Taylor’s com buzzes, he brings it to his ear “Hello?”
Tuun’s voice comes through, tinny but audible “Baby, get back to Triple M! Something’s…happening.”