---Museum---
---Xon’s perspective---
“Look…” I say, excitedly “…look how it’s buried in the durasteel!”
I animatedly point at the helmet with a crumpled bullet wedged partway into it.
“Mmm-hmm.” answer’s Thran.
I read the placard “‘Identified as the helmet of Pvt Bradly Orqina who survived the War and currently lives on his homeworld, Shine Govi (SHEE-nay GOH-vee)’… Isn’t that the planet you said your gardenworlder relations tutor was from?’”
“It was…” she confirms.
I continue “‘…the round was fired from a discarded Terran firearm by [Cdr] Lothurr, an act which caused the shattering of one rib and five of the bones of his arms… Orqina disarmed the [Commander] and, rather than killing him, as Thruljor combat doctrine would have dictated, demanded his surrender, which was promptly offered. Lothurr… did not survive the war… being killed in a failed attempt to liberate his POW camp by Thruljor forces…’ how depressing.”
“It is.” says my girlfriend, distantly.
I look down at her blank face.
“You’re bored.” I point out.
“N…no… I’m not.” she protests.
I chuckle “You’re bored and a terrible liar! What’s wrong, babes?”
She sighs and, after a long pause, says “It’s just… I don’t know… this isn’t very interesting to me, all this War stuff… I’m really sorry. I only agreed to come because you and Emiko were excited for it… I was trying not to let you see that I wasn’t enjoying myself.”
I give a chuckling sigh and pull her shoulder to rest against my hip, saying “It’s lovely that you’ve tried to be considerate like that but I really wish you’d just say when something doesn’t sound like fun!”
“Sorry.” she answers, guiltily.
Checking behind and around myself to make sure I’m not going to create a tripping hazard to any stealthy Thruljex (whose cloven hooves, I have to assume, make avoiding tripping way more difficult than it is for Humans), I kneel down and wrap my arms around her, our faces now almost level.
I touch the tip of my nose to hers and smile “You’ve nothing to be sorry for! I’m sorry I took silence for an endorsement!… I’ll tell you what… let’s try to finish the museum quickly and then we can do something else before we meet the others, OK? Something you’ll find fun?”
She smiles (very slightly) and answers “OK, sounds good… but we don’t need to hurry too much. I can tell Emiko’s enjoying herself here.”
As if answering, Emiko’s head appears around a wall, an excited grin adorning her face for a moment before her face falls, seeing the rather intimate arrangement of the only two people in the room.
“Oh… err…”
“It’s alright, Emiko…” I chuckle, standing back up but not fully releasing Thran from the cuddle “…you aren’t intruding. You found something exciting?”
Her eyes flick between us for a moment before she smiles, nods and gestures for us to follow.
We make our way through the Thruljor War Museum’s halls, past various displays that she seems barely able to not stop to gawk at.
“I have to say, Emiko…” I smirk “…for someone who’s said that she… what was it?… had ‘seen enough war to last from here until the heat death of the universe’, you sure are a military history nerd!”
She turns her head back without breaking stride and wryly answers “Have you girls forgotten that, to me, none of this is history? I lived through all this!”
I shake my head “I’ve not forgotten but that’s even more reason you have to be sick of it!”
She shrugs “I hated it all, at the time… I couldn’t wait to chamber my last cartridge, field dress my last wound, don durasteel for the last time… Afterward, there was a long time where I avoided it like the plague… Then, I don’t even remember what it was but I saw someone on the net just get something catastrophically wrong(!)… I corrected them but then, afterward, got drawn down a rabbithole and, before I knew it, military history was a minor obsession.”
“Not very in line with your whole MILF aesthetic(!)” I tease.
This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
She rolls her eyes (or, having turned back to look where she’s going, rolls her head in a way that suggests an eyeroll) before answering “We ‘MILF’s are allowed our hobbies, too!”
Then she jogs a few paces ahead, stops and turns to her left, holding out her hands toward a grand entranceway. Whatever she was guiding us to must be on the other side.
Thran and I round the corner and I gasp!
We’re at one end of a wide, long and high ceilinged hall. To our left are an array of Terran vehicles, mirrored by equivalent Thruljor vehicles to our right. But it’s not the display that’s so shocking and not the scale of the room either.
What’s taken my breath away is at the far end of the hall, up a 5m tall staircase that spans the width of the room, and framed by smaller staircases, leading to two mezzanine walkways, lining the length of the hall, is a frieze; around 20m tall, 40m wide and three dimensionally sculpted from what looks like gold, it depicts the one scene from the one angle that everyone thinks of when they think of this planet.
I’m pretty certain I can guess who those two golden statues standing in front of it are meant to be!
The three of us walk forward, crossing the hall, past the armoured vehicles and beneath the fighters and drop pods strung from the ceiling.
My eyes are so transfixed on the golden wall that I don’t really take in anything else.
It shows a mostly destroyed Primarchal palace in bas-relief.
Overhead hang two sculpted gouts of water, representing the Two Swords Fountain.
Between the edge of the fountain and the low wall, separating us from the scene, stand a short Human and a tall Thruljec, captured in such faithful detail that (if they weren’t made of solid gold and standing in a museum) they might be able to trick me into thinking they actually were two people, caught in a stasis field!
I think… Yes! They’ve gone as far as to capture not only the crowsfeet at the corner of the Human’s eyes but his pores too!
Without reading the placard I know that the man on the left is “Gen. Musa ‘Mercy’ Ndiaye… and that’s Thruljor Primarch Urojlur.” I say pointing to the towering Thruljec with the impressive set of horns on his head.
Urojlur wears flowing robes and looks down at Ndiaye with a mix of sombre resignation and slight confusion. Ndiaye, in military formal dress, looks up at him with a weary (though genuine looking) smile.
The parts of Ndiaye’s scalp that are visible beneath his beret are shaven clean, his left hand reverently grips a sceptre that the Primarch has just given over to him, his right grasps Urojlur’s hand in a handshake.
“This is… incredible!” I say, breathlessly.
“I thought you’d like it.” smiles Emiko.
Even Thran looks fascinated by this tableau.
“Would you girls like to hear something interesting?” asks Emiko.
“Always!” I answer.
She points to the statue of Ndiaye “He was promoted to General the day before this surrender took place.”
“How… come?” asks Thran, looking confused.
“Because sending a Lieutenant General to accept the surrender of a foreign ruler might have been perceived as a slight, especially when there was a General on world!”
“Why didn’t we just send the other General then? Why did this guy need a last minute promotion?” I ask.
“Because…” chuckles Emiko, withdrawing her holo and tapping at it for a moment before turning it to let me and Thran see an intimidating looking woman with a scarred face, an eyepatch and matted hair, her teeth bared and upper face crinkled in what could be a sneer or a snarl “…the woman Ndiaye had been the subordinate of was Gen. Qadirah ‘Teeth’ Kemp, who’s look and demeanour were deemed bad for propagandic purposes(!) Ndiaye was chosen to be the one to accept the sceptre because he looked a lot less like a snarling barbarian and a lot more like a compassionate, dignified person! He was very much the image of ourselves that we had been trying to project, all War long… And it worked… it was only a few months after this that my sister was walking out onto the floor of Parliament. I don’t know whether that moment would have been possible without this one.”
“I guess that makes sense… still, sucks for Kemp! Imagine doing all the heavy lifting and then getting swapped out, last minute, for a more photogenic subordinate to take all the credit!” I muse.
Emiko shrugs “From what I understand, she was more than OK with it. She was apparently highly uncomfortable having her image recorded in general, and was only too happy to switch with him!”
Frowning at the sculpture, I say “Doesn’t this whole sculpture seem a little… masochistic? I can’t really think of an equivalent moment in our history but can you imagine the UTC making a statue like this to commemorate it if we had? You don’t think we… forced them to put this here, do you?!”
Then I hear a musical laugh from behind us.
I turn, eyebrow raised, to see an unfamiliar Thruljec of indeterminate gender.
They hold up their hand and say “Sorry, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, I just couldn't help overhearing what you said.”
“And, what was so funny about what I said?” I ask, wryly.
The eavesdropper chuckles “Well, firstly, listening to my translator explain the word [masochistic] was very amusing… but the idea that we were forced to build this.” they gesture to the wall “Look at that Terran. Look at the respect he shows, holding the Primarchal Sceptre so carefully. Look at the way he grasps our leader’s hand… I remember seeing this moment when it was first broadcast. I remember my family muttering that the Terrans would definitely force him to grovel, to humiliate himself and his people by crawling on the ground before our conquerors. I remember our confusion over this hand grasping ritual. We naturally assumed that it must be the Terran practice by which the vanquished were humiliated, though we couldn’t work out what it was that differentiated the conquered and the conqueror in this hand grasp. It was only later that we learned this gesture’s actual meaning; ‘I am a friend, let me show you I hold no weapon’. That the undifferentiated action of the two participants is no oversight but an intentional, egalitarian feature!”
“That isn’t… normal?” says Thran, her tone indicating confusion.
The Thruljec turns to her and makes a show of baring their teeth in an attempted smile before saying “That’s more or less the reaction I get every time I try to explain the significance of this mural to a Terran. That confused shrug of ‘Obviously, right? What else might we have done?’ It never gets old! And it’s the precise reason this is a significant enough moment to require a monument such as this… This isn’t a celebration of our defeat, nor of our subsequent occupation. This is a celebration of reconciliation. The day enemy became friend.”