Date Point: 15y7m2d AV
Hierarchy/Cabal Joint Communications session #1463
++0017++: Attempts to infiltrate this ‘Alien Protection Army’ at even the most basic level have met with effectively zero success. While we have achieved contact, their quarantine and safety procedures are rigorous. They insist that anybody interested in meeting them must first demonstrate their sincerity by dead-dropping some material support at a prearranged location—Impossible without Human biodrones. Naturally we’re forced to decline and they vanish. In the end, we attempted direct contact: They informed us that their agenda is ‘Human isolation, not Human extinction,’ and severed contact.
++Tangent++: I take it they didn’t accept that our new strategy aligns with their agenda.
++0017++: They saw no reason to take our word for it. So far, we’re yet to achieve any further contact. They seem to know when it’s us calling, now.
++0023++: They’re remarkably competent, then.
++0017++: Yes. I suspect that their senior members are highly skilled and knowledgeable in the ways of conspiracy and insurrection. Given how completely we are locked out from both the APA and the Human intelligence agencies, it’s difficult to say. In any case, I must conclude in short that the APA are closed to us.
++0023++: Too bad all that competence doesn’t translate into results. Their ‘Day of Reckoning’ certainly rattled the Human authorities, but in the grand scheme of things it wasn’t particularly impressive.
++Tangent++: True. A handful of deaths, many of which were nonhumans and most of the dead Humans were APA activists. A high-profile murder in front of an audience is hardly enough to shake the pillars of civilization.
++Cynosure++: I don’t know. It’s a useful smokescreen at least.
++0014++: <Alarm; shock> You aren’t listed as active in this channel! How are you doing that?
++Cynosure++: I figured that trick out centuries ago. How do you think I was able to establish the Cabal right under your noses? But it doesn’t matter.
++0014++: <Irritation> It most certainly does!
++Cynosure++: No, please don’t let me derail the conversation. As I was saying, the APA’s activities are a useful smokescreen.
++0023++: For what? We have no assets on Earth.
++0023++: <Annoyed> …And of course he doesn’t reply.
++0017++: He’s always enjoyed being cryptic.
++Cynosure++: Apologies. I was distracted, not snubbing you.
++Tangent++: …And? Don’t hold out on us, boss. A smokescreen for what?
++Cynosure++: For a friend of mine.
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: USER CYNOSURE QUIT.
++0014++: Oh, well that’s just fucking charming.
++Tangent++: <Amused> You’re using Human swearwords now?
++0014++: It is entirely appropriate. I hope you intend to interrogate him about his so-called ‘friend?’
++Tangent++: <Resigned> Only if I want to waste my time. Working with him is always like this.
++0017++: <Dryly> I remember. Well, he’s always a step ahead. I suppose we shall just have to wait and see what or who this ‘friend’ of his is.
++Tangent++: We won’t be waiting long. He wouldn’t have hinted at it if it wasn’t already in motion.
++0023++: I hope you’re right… What’s next?
++0014++: The latest report on the dataphage.
++0017++: We have a confirmed sighting?
++0014++: No, but a Hunter facility deep in the Manu’ch Cloud went dark a few cycles ago. And if I’m right, they were building exactly the sort of thing the dataphage will want…
Date Point: 15y7m2d AV
δ Cyg 244.3° 18-ECCBAF-TRINARY M6V-1 b1, Deep Space
Entity
The system was… nowhere. It almost didn’t exist. The largest of its three stars was a tiny, cool red dwarf barely a tenth the mass of Sol, and the other two were brown dwarves that barely qualified for the word “star” at all. They were more like ultra-dense, superheated gas giants.
Still: each had their assortment of rocky and icy bodies that rode the line somewhere between being a planet and a moon, the very biggest of which was about two thousand kilometers across.
Such meagre wastelands made up the overwhelming majority of star systems in the Milky Way. It was anonymous, unremarkable, and therefore absolutely perfect for the Entity’s needs.
It had a body.
Ava-memories flickered through its mind as it basked in the stellar wind, extending tuned forcefields to catch the light and charged particles. The feeling was like a pleasant cool breeze on its skin. The sensation of its capacitors and hydrogen fuel tanks refilling inspired it to reference the combined sensations of slaked thirst and boosted energy after a morning coffee.
It hadn’t known. It hadn’t been capable of knowing. Its entire existence had been a prolonged bout of sensory deprivation, and now for the first time it could feel.
There was no going back from here. It had planned to hand the device over to the scientists at Erebor, but now…
No. No, it couldn’t. Going back after a taste of this ambrosia would be unbearable.
But the Hunters would build more. It may have stolen the prototype, wiped their computer systems and killed some of their expert shipbuilders during the heist, but they would have backups, other shipbuilders and survivors. The shipyard itself was still intact. So although the Entity had successfully delayed the Hunters’ release of this new ship, it was only a delay. So Erebor needed to know.
All the conflicting impulses, emotions and thoughts were giving it the equivalent of a headache. <Duty> was a new one. It slotted neatly into a hitherto unexplored space in the <Survive> – <FindAllies> – <Cooperate> tree.
But at the same time there was this new sensation that it didn’t have a word for. The feeling of taking joy in one’s own body for the first time. It came with a significant load of something akin to <Jealousy>, amid a new and expanding chain of thoughts branching of from the <Survive> – <RemainSane> sequence.
Moments like these when two of its secondary objectives, both equally important in support of the primary objective, were in conflict were always difficult for the Entity. A Human would have made the decision effortlessly: Their instincts, their impulses and their preconceptions would all swing into place and bias them strongly toward one over the other long before they actually tried to make a rational decision.
Ava Ríos, for instance, would not have hesitated to turn the ship over. Her instincts were self-sacrificing, driven in some part by self-hatred.
As simpler as it might have been to simply flow through decisions like that, the Entity didn’t have that luxury. The structure of the mind it had woven for itself was such that it couldn’t reflexively value one impulse over the other. Both were second-tier objectives, and thus equally important.
Clearly, it needed time to think. It didn’t mind that so much, because that meant more time to enjoy this new body and see what it could do.
And there was one feature in particular that it was very eager to try out.
It pulled in its solar collection fields and initiated a sublight warp across the system toward an asteroid cluster at the L1 point between the two brown dwarfs. The survey sensors had already picked up an abundance of all the minerals it needed there. As meager as this system might be, even that one concentration of resources contained enough raw material to make hundreds of new ships.
It was time to test the nanofactory.
Date Point: 15y7m2d AV
Builder Facility, Hunter Space
The Builder Alpha-of-Alphas
Life support and artificial gravity were back online, and after a lengthy extravehicular mission the main doors had finally been forced closed. The facility was at least habitable again.
There, the list of progress ended. Nine hundred and fifty thousandths of the computer systems were still occupied territory, ravaged by the hostile software and not safe to connect to anything. One incautious Builder had tried interfacing directly and had promptly died of an extensive and violent brain seizure. The communications systems were completely compromised, meaning there was no way to order a ship to bring in replacements, and any new ship the nanofactory built would be compromised even if they had had the necessary materials.
If the Broodship belonging to the Endless Thirst hadn’t been docked and secure, things might have been dire. They didn’t dare attach it to the facility’s network, but in the end the Builders were able to completely scrub the computers and restore them using the ship’s computers and some prolonged frustration.
The work took all day, done methodically, carefully and correctly. But eventually they were able to reconnect to the wider Hunter communications grid and summon a delivery of supplies and new Builders to replace the casualties of the theft.
Doing so, however, depleted the last of the reserves in one of the Builders’ few remaining emergency stockpiles.
The whole system was all falling apart. The whole point of developing the replicating ship was that it would be able to remove resource pressure by self-assembling a fleet without consuming stored resources. Now, with the replicating ship long-gone, the Alpha-of-Alphas found itself unable to drum up enough material to build a replacement in time to avoid a catastrophic logistical shortfall.
It had hoped to avoid this. Raiding was part of Hunter nature, but each raid was a gamble, each assault an invitation to disaster. The Prey had always fought back, sometimes they even succeeded. As the Alpha-of-Alphas’ predecessor had discovered to its cost, however, the Prey learned. Deathworlders in particular learned quickly. Raids had grown more and more costly since the Humans first emerged from their fortress home system, and now the Grand Army of the Gao made every raid a serious gamble.
The Alpha-of-Alphas had come up with many ideas on how to improve the odds. It had developed what it hoped would be effective counters to the deathworlders’ tactics, all of which were after all just cunningly engineered solutions. But once revealed, those counters would be known, and would be countered in turn. It had hoped to save them for a moment of decisive victory.
Now, it needed them in a moment of decisive defeat.
It sent the order out across the network, picked a target, and told the Broods to muster.
Meat to the Maw.
Date Point: 15y7m2d AV
HCS-501 I Met God And She Booped My Nose, Asteroid Belt, Sol.
Drew Martin
The asteroid belt was…
Big really wasn’t a big enough word. There wasn’t a big enough word to adequately describe a large planet’s worth of rocks scattered loosely in an orbit with an average circumference of two and a half billion kilometers.
Heck, it wasn’t the right word to describe any of those rocks either. On the grand scale of things, each was a tiny speck of dust, two light seconds on average from its nearest neighbor. The Earth and its moon could have fit comfortably through that kind of a gap.
Take the asteroid 4046 Spencer, for instance. It didn’t have a real name, just a number and the surname of the Hephaestus surveyor who’d first found and tagged it. It was, by asteroid standards, a baby.
On the scale of anything with a pulse and limbs, however, it was a potato-shaped mountain that had at some point in its ancient history collided with another mountain and cracked open to expose a metallic core rich in panguite.
That chunk of panguite all by itself represented enough titanium, scandium, aluminium, magnesium and zirconium to build a whole fleet of ships. Throw in the ubiquitous nickel-iron, the olivine chondrules and a healthy dose of iridium, and Matt Spencer’s surveyor’s fee was going to make him a very, very rich man.
Of course… they had to mine it first. And a rock that big couldn’t exactly fit into a rock crusher. It needed to be smaller. It needed, in fact, to be reduced to rubble.
And there was only one tool for the job of reducing an asteroid to rubble. A tool that made Drew C, two light-minutes away back on Ceres, understandably nervous.
“Final check reminder that you’ve confirmed your safe holding distance?”
Drew M rolled his eyes and muttered a quiet strewth to himself before replying. “What kind of a bloody fool d’you think I am, mate? I’m not playing around with a firecracker here, we’re a light second away, the shields are good… we’re green to go. Confirm you’re ready on your end, over.”
He busied himself with confirming that everything he’d just said was true as he waited out the four minutes for his counterpart’s reply, which began with a chuckle.
“All green confirmed, we’re ready here. Blow it in your own time. Bring this one home and I might start to actually trust you know what you’re doing. Ceres out.”
Drew laughed and aimed a middle finger at the console purely for his own gratification, then turned to the rest of the mining crew.
HCS-501, the mining barge ‘I Met God And She Booped My Nose,’ was the newest ship in Hephaestus Consortium’s fleet and it was built for one job: to re-enact the movie Armageddon. It was designed to land on an asteroid, drill into its core, and then drop a nuke down the hole and retreat to a safe distance before blowing the rock apart from the inside.
Unlike the movie, the crew were seasoned professionals and the work had gone smoothly without so much as a near-miss.
It was the first ever civilian application of nuclear weaponry, and negotiating that little concession had been… delicate. Several countries that had spent a long time trying to get the bomb were understandably furious when a private corporation was given access to something they lacked.
Of course, the difference between them and HC was that HC could produce weapons-grade uranium.
They’d learned a lot about high-tech mineral refining over the years in the belt. Developed a lot of proprietary tech, a lot of industrial secrets all aimed at spinning useful elements out of asteroid ore in low-gravity or freefall environments. An efficient technique for enriching uranium had fallen out of that process quite by accident and… well, it had attracted attention from the Powers That Be.
Especially seeing as Hephaestus had access to all the uranium they could ever want. The belt was an effectively unlimited source of the stuff.
AEC meanwhile needed that enriched uranium. The Allies were at war, and every time they clashed with Hunters or pirates or Hierarchy forces, hard-earned resources got damaged or destroyed. At its peak, the battle of Gao had consumed more warheads inside half an hour than every nuclear test fired globally in the whole of the 20th Century.
Having those resources had made for a pretty strong hand. A lot of bargaining chips on the Hephaestus side of the table. And of course, the promise was that if they could use nukes to shatter asteroids, then the supply of uranium would only grow.
The result, eventually, had been a carefully negotiated, tightly stringent, sensibly paranoid and strictly limited contract: Hephaestus provided the refined materials, AEC provided a handful of physics packages under close scrutiny.
The first of those packages was now buried deep in the heart of 4046 Spencer, just waiting to do its one-time destructive thing.
Drew clapped their pilot on the shoulder. Sam Jordan had transferred over from the My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon, citing that he no longer felt safe straying outside the system defence fields around Sol and Cimbrean, and Drew couldn’t blame him: between the abduction shenanigans over Origin and the run-in with Hunters on the spacelanes, he wouldn’t have wanted to stay on that ship either.
The young man had definitely earned his keep when he gently landed on and anchored to 4046 Spencer without so much as a bump and to within millimeters of the selected drill site. The drill crew had been singing his praises all the way down to the core.
“We recording?”
Jordan nodded. “You know we’re going to get some bad press for this, right?”
“Eh. No worries. Shareholders won’t give a rat’s arse when they’re rich enough to build their own fuckin’ Scrooge McDuck vaults.”
“Screw the rules, we have money, eh?”
“Bloody right!”
Across the bridge, their sensor tech Alejandro snorted. “So you got any big important words for the history books, Drew?”
Drew shrugged. “…Drinks are on me,” he said. “New let’s pop ‘er and get paid.”
There was a subdued cheer, and the arming codes were broken out, entered and readied.
“Comms?”
“Linked.”
“Arming charge… Armed and ready to detonate.”
“Local space?”
“Clear of all drive signatures, FTL wakes or comms traffic. No replies to our warning broadcast… Safe to blast.”
Drew grinned and flipped up the cover on the button. “Fire in the hole.”
He pushed the button. Two seconds later, the light from the detonation reached them.
Drew watched as the debris started to spread out. There were a lot of little high-speed pieces zipping away into the black at tens of thousands of kilometers a second, but true to the calculations the material of the asteroid mostly just started to slowly spread out into a big cloud of more manageable chunks. In a few centuries their feeble gravity might pull them back together, but that wasn’t going to happen. Humanity would claim them first.
He turned to the comms and made his report with a big grin on his face. “…Ceres, HCS-501 here. 4046 Spencer is ready for harvest.”
Now the only question was what they were going to spend their multi-million-dollar bonuses on.
Date Point: 15y7m2d AV
High Mountain Fortress, Gao
Champion Thurrsto of Clan Whitecrest
“Y’have a lot ‘ta learn.”
Thurrsto duck-nodded carefully. He’d already received that exact warning from Genshi, who’d added the footnote thought that perhaps a disgraced former Champion may not be the most reliable mentor in these matters.
‘After all,’ he’d said. ‘I got caught.’
Regaari had privately voiced his opinion that it was precisely this lack of contrition which had led to Genshi’s face being almost as mangled as Father Garaaf’s, while his own was effectively pristine. Daar valued honesty and forthrightness: He absolutely could not tolerate unrepentant disobedience from his spymasters and intelligence chiefs.
That said a lot about Whitecrest’s value to the Great Father. And indeed, if Daar had lived up to the example of his forebear, then there would no longer be a Whitecrest. Fyu hadn’t balked at wiping out defiant Clans in their entirety.
Then again… Clans were a different things now, compared to what they had been a thousand years ago. Back then they had been more like quasi-nomadic nation-states. Nowadays, they were skilled specialists. Whitecrest was by far and away the pre-eminent Clan of spies, intelligence-gatherers, infiltrators and agent provocateurs; Daar simply couldn’t afford that loss.
He couldn’t even afford to lose Genshi.
…Just how fragile was the Great Father’s throne, really?
Fragile indeed, to judge by the way Daar had pounced on Thurrsto to personally instruct him in the ways of Championhood.
“So I’m told.”
“Naw, I don’t mean about bein’ a Champion. Only bit’a advice I’m givin’ ‘ya there is don’t listen too close to how the others do it. You were chosen for this. That means they want you, not a clone of some other Champion.”
“So, take their advice with a grain of salt.”
“Yyyup. Naw, today’s lesson is about… other stuff. Deep history, the stuff that takes this whole war, the Clans, the Females, me, an’ puts it all into perspective. ”
“This has to do with the coronation?”
“You’ll see.”
They were in the archives. In the days before the invasion, Clan Highmountain had sealed an enormous volume of historic artefacts away in a vault kilometers below the fortress. The geoengineering involved was incredible: they’d bored a shaft, installed the vault, filled the vault, and then sealed up the shaft again so precisely that only the most sensitive instruments installed right at the surface would have found it. Not even deep-penetrating seismophones could find the vault itself: it was too small, and too carefully shaped to disguise its own presence.
Thus had the history of the Gao been saved for the future. The fact that it all turned out to be unnecessary in the end was considered a blessing rather than a waste. ‘Better to have and not need, than need and not have,’ after all.
Of course, retrieving it all had been even more difficult than putting it down there in the first place. Excavating the original bunker had involved explosives. Opening it safely had required a slower and more patient approach. But it was open, and all the buried treasures were now being carefully catalogued and returned to their appropriate place. Apparently the Highmountains were even excited for the opportunity to re-organize it all and implement a superior filing system.
As far as Thurrsto was concerned, there was absolutely nothing to get excited about in the words ‘superior filing system.’
There was a lot to be interested in, though. Especially the large crate that the Great Father had specifically requested. Something about his cryptic promise to the Champions at the day’s end ceremony only the night before.
Its contents were now neatly arrayed across a banquet-sized table deep in the fortress basements, and they varied greatly in size from an amulet about the size of Thurrsto’s palm, through Fyu’s personal suit of armor, all the way up to a fractured clay tablet the size of a table in its own right, covered in ancient claw-writing.
The first item Daar picked up, however, was a skull which he handed to Thurrsto with reverence. “Grandfather Talo found this about three years ago, a few months before he died.”
Genshi studied it. “…Female?”
“Yeah. We’ve learned a lot about her in the last few years. Her name was Muya. She was born in the harem at Yem Sha, sold to the Lan Hu when she was still little more than a cub. She was about as old as Mother Giymuy when she was, uh… executed in Wi Kao.”
Thurrsto had a sudden paranoid vision of himself dropping the precious item, and carefully put her down with respect. “…She was one of the Sisterhood?”
“Yeah. By Tiritya’s side, right to the end.” Daar reverentially touched a claw to a spot on the skull’s side, just behind the eye socket. “See there? That rough patch?”
Thurrsto knelt to get a closer look. “…Damage of some kind,” he said.
“Remind you of anything?”
“…I don’t know. Bone cancer? Or…” A dark suspicion about what kind of thing Daar might find significant in an ancient skull nudged his memory. “…Transcranial nanofilaments would leave scarring like that, I guess.”
“Exactly. Good eye!”
“So she had a transcranial implant.” Thurrsto looked at the artefacts on the table. With his suspicion confirmed, he ran his eye over the other artefacts on the table. “…The Hierarchy were manipulating us for a long time.”
“Yeah. Much, much longer than just this.” Daar carefully lifted Muya’s skull and returned it to the safety of a padded box. He indicated the clay tablet. “That goes right back to the Isthmus Clans, an’ those—” he indicated a set of high-resolution images to his left which turned out to be cave paintings, “—are from the Bat-Yu Gorge.”
He swept his paw along the table. “Every one’a these is a little piece of the puzzle. They don’t make a lotta sense on their own. Hell, if you got ‘em all together you wouldn’t draw much from ‘em anyway… unless you had the cipher of knowin’ ‘bout the Hierarchy. Then they tell a story, clear as Naxas stink.”
“The amulet?”
“Personalized badge of office worn by a senior Father of the Wi Sho. See those runes at the bottom? They’re the number Forty-Seven. Whole fuckin’ forests died to write all the papers debating the significance of that.”
“A Hierarchy agent who couldn’t resist indulging their ego?”
“That’s my theory.”
“…With all respect, My Father, that’s kinda circumstantial.”
“Yeah-huh. All of it is.”
“What about Fyu’s armor?”
Daar nodded and considered his forebear’s wargear. It occurred to Thurrsto that Fyu had in fact been a tiny, scrappy little terror; certainly Thurrsto would never be able to fit in that suit. Strange. In his head, he’d always envisioned the first Great Father as a rampaging brute to equal Daar.
“Famously decorated with poetry honoring Tiritya’s life an’ sacrifice, right?” Daar took the left vambrace off the mannequin and handed it over. The lacquered leather was scarred from a sword-stroke that had exposed and dented the steel underneath, but it was still in otherwise excellent condition and the brush-strokes of the poem under the clear lacquer were clearly legible.
“…I can’t read this,” he said.
“I can. It’s called the ‘odd poem’ by the Highmountains. The one that don’t quite fit or make sense. Just as beautiful—the old tyrant was a fuckin’ master poet—but all the rest form a set an’ this one seems ‘ta stick out…”
“…Unless you realize he was writing about Big Hotel,” Thurrsto guessed.
“Yeah. An’ that puts the most biggest itch on my nuts, ‘cuz I’ve been tryin’ for a whole year ‘ta figger out just how in the fuck he knew about them, an’ how much.” Daar sighed.
“Weren’t some of his personal documents lost in a fire shortly after he died?” Thurrsto recalled.
“Yeah.” Daar chittered darkly for a moment. “Real coincidental, that.”
Thurrsto duck-nodded solemnly and handed back the vambrace. “Still. This is still all very circumstantial…”
“Yup. But there’s one more thing you gotta see. An’ this I’m keepin’ close to the chest, ‘fer now.”
“Oh?”
Daar reached up and respectfully strapped the vambrace back onto the mannequin. Thurrsto had to admit, Fyu in his full regalia would have been a fearsome sight despite his diminutive size. “During the war, Champion Reeko from the Straightshields caught himself a biodrone with a Hierarchy ghost in it. The Humans interrogated it. We have video, an’ I’ll let you watch it later but believe me: It turns all’a this from circumstantial to solid.”
Even if Stonebacks were known to lie, which of course they infamously weren’t, Thurrsto knew the Great Father well enough to know that he’d be extra specially honest in matters such as this. “…Very well,” he said. “What does all of this have to do with the coronation?”
“You tell me.”
Ah. A test.
“You… want to put the coronation in its proper context?”
“Good start. Keep goin’.”
“…Is this about sending a message, or about what you believe? No, wait. It can be both. And of course it’s about sending a message, that’s what a coronation is…” Thurrsto trailed off, doing his best to ignore the amused set of the Great Father’s ears.
He scratched his own ears as he thought, combed his claws through his whiskers, and mentally worked through what he knew of Daar’s psych profile, the new revelations, the context they would inevitably put things in…
“…We’re our own species again,” he said. “For the first time in… in recorded history. Not only have we exposed the Hierarchy’s influence, we’ve broken free of it. So much so that they tried to destroy us… and failed.”
“So?”
“So…” Thurrsto knew his ears were twisting this way and that as he thought. “…I… have noticed that this coronation has, well, mystical undertones…”
Thurrsto had only learned the Gaoian native word for ‘mystical’ recently. It was rough and ancient, not at all a fit in modern Gaori, and it apparently impressed Daar.
“S’true. I ain’t avoidin’ the connotations… where’d you hear that word anyway?”
“Champion Gyotin. Do you watch his vlog?”
“Wish I had the time…” Daar grumbled. “An’ yeah. He an’ I think alike about resurrectin’ our spiritual heritage. It was stolen from us, an’ I mean ‘ta bring it back.”
“Bring it back, or reinvent it?” Thurrsto asked. Daar shot him a Look, and he ducked his head respectfully. “My Father, we can’t really know anything about our history. If this proves anything—” he waved a hand at the assembled treasures, “—it’s that everything we think we know about our past is suspect. The well’s been poisoned. Why keep trying to drink from it, when we could dig a fresh well?”
“We can figger out the bits that were authentically ours by payin’ attention t’what the Hierarchy spent the most effort killin.’ Or, at least, the bits that spoke most to our nature.”
“To what end?”
“Gettin’ back what they stole from us is the end!” Daar said. “The first step ta’ rebuildin’ our souls is knowin’ exactly what we are. We can’t damn well figger out a way forward if we ain’t got no idea where we’re starting!”
“Where we’re starting is here and now, surely?” Thurrsto asked. “My Father, I don’t disagree with any of this, I just…”
“Just what? Ain’t comfortable with mysticism? Don’t like old, discarded ideas? Afraid of superstition? Think maybe we’ll regress? Thurrsto…look outside. Look at the rapes and shit that’s still happenin.’ I’m gonna be breakin’ another damn fool next week, because no matter how fuckin’ creatively violent I get, there’s still dumb fucks out there that think they can get away with it! How much, exactly, is left to regress? The only thing keepin’ the Gao together right now is my Army, and my force o’ will. That can’t be all we have! Like…look. I’m takin’ pretty extreme measures, Brother. It’s why I’m trainin’ like crazy, so’s I can live up to the myth I gotta embody. It’s why I’m doin’ the Crue-G life extending medicine and everything.”
“…But you won’t last forever.”
“Exactly. And Thurrsto, if I don’t get another damn thing done as Great Father, it’ll be this: there can never be another like me. We need to find out what we naturally are. The Gao need to define themselves without it bein’ imposed by force, whether that force is sapient malware, the Clans themselves, or gods help us, another Great Father.”
“Gods help us?” Thurrsto considered the artefacts on the table again. “…What is a god?”
“That, Brother, is exactly the question I wanna ask. ‘Cept the thing is, I wanna ask everyone.”
There was a long silence, before Thurrsto finally combed his whiskers with a claw. “…I don’t understand. But I’ll follow.”
“…I know. But let me try it one more way, then we’ll move on. I think one definition of a god that, uh, resonates? Yeah. Resonates with me at least? A god is a Truth. Like, a stand-in for something real, even if the god itself is just a story. Does that make sense?”
“Why not just speak the Truth, then? Why abstract it?”
“Cuz an abstraction is like a distilled truth, ‘cuz sometimes we ain’t really suited to learn hard truths otherwise. Like…in the Final Rite? In Stoneback? To really get at some of this we exhaust a candidate to the point he’s basically hallucinatin’ about everything. Then we tell ‘em the stories. The old stories. It’s gotta be personal. And if there’s any people more people-oriented than humans, it just might be us.”
Thurrsto shuffled his paws against the concrete. “…That runs against the very core of Clan Whitecrest’s philosophy, My Father. We light the darkness: that means dragging the Truth out in the open, tearing away the layers of smoke and confusion around it. Our whole job is to cut away the stories and get at what’s real. This… Maybe it’s an important story. Maybe it’s the most importantest.”
Daar gave him a wry look. “I’m susceptible to flattery, Thurrsto. But don’t overuse it.”
Thurrsto returned an apologetic set of his ears and a share of amusement. “As you wish. …I do trust your vision. Even if it runs counter to everything I spent my life learning, if you say we need to wrap Truth in a story to get it into our people’s heads—”
“I don’t know if we do, but I can say that seems ‘ta work with other sapients. An’ I trust ‘yer advice too, ‘cuz ‘yer right: We can’t make this just…iunno, stupid stories about Keedas in the sky. But a story don’t have to be literally true ‘ta teach Truth. Even if we know they’re just stories, we can still learn from ‘em. An’ If anything else, it’ll help the cubs unnerstand what the Gao are. Balls, maybe they’ll figger it out ‘fore we do.”
“…And a coronation is a story.”
“Yeah. It’s a terrible story, Thurrsto. It’s gonna make me somethin’ like a god. I don’t wanna be that. All I ever wanted ‘ta do was farm things, build things, and woo Females. But…”
“But you said it yourself: there’s not much further to regress.” Thurrsto duck-nodded, then gasped as he received a hefty, heavy paw-blow to the back in congratulations.
“There, see! You got here way more faster than Reeko did.”
“That straight-spined walking steel bar? I should hope so!”
“Ha!” Daar’s baritone chitter could shake a room. “Don’t misunnerstand, Reeko’s a stand-up tail. I respect him. And I really need my Champions ‘ta feel like they can challenge my ideas. In private. Or, y’know. Not belligerently. But I really do think we need to do this, even if it ends up we decide it’s all a load o’ naxas shit.”
“We’ll be richer for knowing either way,” Thurrsto duck-nodded.
“Yeah. Help me light this darkness, Thurrsto. We’ve got a lotta spy-work and worse besides gettin’ to the bottom of it all. All the Clans got a part of the secret. I’m gonna start by openin’ up Stoneback’s Rites, at least to the Champions. We gotta share. An’ it’ll be painful. And maybe embarassin’. But we gotta start somewhere.”
He saw Thurrsto’s expression. “…That’s a big ask, huh?”
“…You’re asking me to violate a sacred trust I only just learned myself a few days ago,” Thurrsto said, noting the irony in his words.
“There’s that word. Sacred.”
“Yes. And it was made by a Champion who bore his throat to Fyu.” Thurrsto indicated the armor.
“…How? Whitecrest didn’t exist back then… Unless they did?”
Thurrsto just gave the Great Father a complicated and highly communicative Look.
Daar pondered for a bit. “…Okay. Then I really gotta start this off m’self. Lemme talk ‘ta Fiin. I think I need to share our Rites. ‘Cuz I’m th’ only one that can. After the coronation, anyway.”
“Which is when?”
“Months away, still. There’s a lot ‘ta do, and I need’ta talk with the humans about what happened to one our Sisters in Folctha.”
Thurrsto wracked his brain. The APA attack and the way a single armed human had carved a shockingly fast slaughter through the Alien Quarter before being stopped dead—very literally—at the gates of the Commune had been a major source of discontent that Whitecrest had been quietly working to balm. The Gao could be more than vengeful when Females were involved, and the one thing that had made Whitecrest’s job easier was that none of the females or cubs had come to any harm, as far as he knew.
“I thought the Commune of Females escaped unharmed? Mother Myun–”
“You’re forgetting that one of the Sisters ain’t biologically a Gaoian,” Daar reminded him. “Sister Shoo got hurt.”
His words landed with authority and finality.
“…I see.”
“Yeah. Yulna… ain’t happy. I don’t think our alliance with the Humans is gonna be hurt, not really. But I can’t ignore it either. I’ve asked her ‘ta visit me an’ talk about it.”
“And you have a museum to show off to all the other Champions before then. I should let you have fun with the next one… who is next, by the way?”
“Wozni.”
“Oh, I bet you’ll have endless fun with him,” Thurrsto chittered. Wozni was so terribly serious and earnest. “I won’t keep you from it.”
Daar just flicked an ear and bid him farewell. Thurrsto left the archives and returned upstairs in a deeply thoughtful mood, far deeper than he’d have thought. It wasn’t just the words and arguments, the sheer animated conviction that held Daar in its grip was enough to frame the whole encounter. He’d known Daar to be a creature of big passions, but this? This… fire?
It was clearly earnest. But again, it betrayed just how precarious the throne really was, and just how much Daar needed his Champions. For all his zeal, the Great Father couldn’t do it alone. Which meant the Champions still held a lot of power… But Genshi had been wrong: Daar did know best.
Of that much, Thurrsto was now certain.