First Contact

Chapter 958: The Setting Sun

The concept of shooting oneself in the foot is very much a Terran philosophy. While the Pubvians may plot and scheme against one another they always do so within the framework of their dominance philosophy. A Terran will, for no reason that can be explained, suddenly embark upon courses of action that lead to absolute disaster, including the destruction of carefully laid plans, even including the loss of their own life.

Thus, my Twelfth Law of Humans: A human will grab victory from the jaws of defeat and defeat from the grasp of victory in equal measure but what they will do with such accomplishments is nearly entirely up to chance. - P'Thok's Laws of Humans

Dead Terrans Still Kill - Blockbuster Lanaktallan Horror Movie franchise

It never fails. People always try me. They look at me and something in their brain tells them 'I can totally take that dude in a fight'. I don't know why. -Magnus Oathsworn

I love my brother, but I swear he could find a fight in a closet. - Surscee Oathsworn

Nakteti raised her head, blinking. She'd fallen over on her side and her nose had bled. Magnus was sitting up, frowning behind the clear macroplas shield of his combat suit. Surscee was still asleep and to Nakteti's eyes it looked like she had vomited and the suit's internal systems had cleaned it up. Chuck was still offline, his telltales blinking amber.

She looked at the four Terrans.

Chronotronic Knights of the Combine, she thought to herself.

She couldn't see their faces. The front of their helmets were armored, just three slashes where sensors were carefully guarded. The suits were sleek looking, with bulky shoulders and heavy equipment on the back.

Chuck had already broken their decryption and she was able to get a complete feed off of their armor.

All four of them were unconscious. Two were still having nightmares, another was shivering with mat-trans shock but nearing consciousness, and the last one was just starting to have their brainwaves and biological systems start to reset.

She couldn't remember her nightmare, just that it had ended with her screaming at a dead sky.

Nakteti knew she had stared at more than one dead night sky.

One of the Knights was obviously the leader. Of course, the rank of Lord Knight of the Black Rose might have something to do with it. Two were Lord Knights of the Sword, with the last being the Lord Knight of the Tome. Despite the voices, two were female Terrans, which Nakteti decided meant that all of them were using voice changers.

She had to admit, she didn't trust them.

She had read Terran history and knew that the Combine had seized control of Terran Space and the Republic, undermining the Republic during the war against the Mantid to seize power. That, in turn, had led to the rise of the TerraSol Imperium of Light.

The "Light" seemed to Nakteti to be the light of novasparks, planet crackers, and body incinerators.

She had checked their armor's time/date stamps, and the timestamps showed they were within a year of the estimated date of the attack on Terra and her colonies by the Mantid.

The question in Nakteti's mind, is just how xenophobic these Combine soldiers were. How they would truly react to a digital sentience that could walk around in a human sized frame.

How they would react to the twins.

While Magnus often appeared relaxed and easy going and Surscee was all smiles, gentle teasing, and laughter, Nakteti had seem them 'go to work' more than once.

Nakteti knew that Magnus's blade and Surscee's 'magic' would be more than a match for what the Combine troops assume was bleeding edge weaponry and armor.

She kept her eyes closed, lowering her head, using her armor's sensors, her datalink, and her retinal link to keep an eye on everyone else.

Magnus stood up, stretching, then moved over to his sister. He knelt down and shook her gently.

"Rise and shine, Arch-Magus," he said softly.

Surscee just groaned.

Nakteti waited until Surscee and the four Chronotronic Knights were on their feet until she got up. She feigned tremors and fatigue, following everyone out of the mat-trans chamber and into the primary control room.

One of the Knights, the Knight of the Tome, looked around.

"I don't know what it is, but I swear that it always feels like someone walked out just before we opened the door," he said.

"You're just paranoid," another said.

Other than that, they were silent as Magnus led the way out of the mat-trans facility. Like all three of the facilities Nakteti had walked through, the only path that was not sealed with heavy duty blast doors was a direct line from the front door to the central mat-trans chamber.

Once outside she waited for the four Knights to come out.

They stopped, looking around.

Buildings were blurred, with shimmering versions of themselves overlapping the most solid version. Shades flickered as they swept through the multiplicity of streets. The mag-line of the fusion plant that would normally be invisible was a glowing tube in the sky that visibly twisted.

A path wound between shimmerings. The path had half-meter wide and meter tall cylinders, attached to the ground with arm length rivets pinning the flanges down.

"Time is a little wobbily," Surscee said. She looked to the side at where a shimmering line of trees had limbs bowed with the weight of ripened fruit. She gave a sigh. "And lo, I rendered fruitless."

Magnus led the way slowly, with Chuck pulling up the rear and Nakteti holding tight to Surscee's hand.

The overlap between the temporal stabilizers made her stomach churn.

"These are disruptors and stabilizers?" the Knight of Tomes asked.

"Yes," Magnus said, pausing to check a red light. He opened the top and adjusted the controls. The red light winked out.

"You need something the size of a cargo ship to produce that," the Knight of Tomes argued.

"The Second Precursor War mandated some new developments," Magnus said. He looked around. "I was right. Keeping the area of effect tight is making sure we don't suffer any major disruptions to the structure itself."

"Second Precursor War?" the Lord Knight of Black Roses asked.

"Turns out the Mantid had an old set of enemies. The Lanaktallan, a herd species, and the Atrekna, a temporal adept species from another, dead, universe," Surscee said. She shrugged. "I do not know much, just what any other civilian knows."

"And the Mantid? We were fighting them too?" the Knight of the Sword with the toolkit hardcase on each hip asked.

"No. They are founding members of the Terran Confederacy. They fought the Lanaktallan and the Atrekna with us," Chuck said. "The Lanaktallan joined the Confederacy once they were defeated, in order to keep the Atrekna from devouring the universe."

"Huh," one of them said.

"We have to take another mat-trans to Alpha Layer. From there we move to the base of Space Elevator C19 dash 7A," Chuck said. "That's what we're using for a staging area."

"Why?" The Knight of the Tome asked.

"We're using the nanoforges and creation engines of our ship to manufacture the components needed to repair what we have to," Chuck said.

He got Nakteti's order to not explain that little bit after he finished talking.

"Low class forge and engines?" the Rose Knight asked.

"Yeah. Civilian grade," Nakteti lied.

They were silent again.

That hinky feeling strengthened but Nakteti kept quiet.

-----

Nakteti noticed that they never took off their armor. Not even to sleep. Not to eat.

She didn't say a word about the fact that Chuck handed out small temporal disruptor/stabilizers that would work in roughly a meter around the person holding it.

He didn't trust them either.

Magnus seemed cordial, Surscee friendly, toward the Chronotronic Knights, but Nakteti had known the twins for long enough to know that when they acted that way they were at their most dangerous.

She forbid them from boarding the ship. Telling them that there was dimensional barrier breaching damage to some systems and she could not update the ship's registry to include them as authorized personnel.

She eavesdropped on their complaints, but the Rose Knight counseled patience.

Nakteti made sure she was carrying both knives and her sword at all time. She made sure that they saw that using her gripping hands to hold onto something was an ingrained instinctive habit, so eventually they ignored her standing there, holding onto her sword tightly.

The repairs went faster.

Nakteti said nothing about the fact that the Knight of Tomes seemed to be the only engineer. The others just lifted and carried, and the Rose Knight often seemed slightly offended that he was asked to carry something, or turn it on or off, or just supervise the robots.

The work went slowly.

Michael insisted that separating the chronologically oldest layer first was the primary goal. Doing that would provide a baseline for the rest of the temporal banding and layers to be separated.

The Knights did nothing that Nakteti could grasp with her gripping hands, but she just felt that there was something off about the Knights.

Something strange.

They had avoided talking about, either changing the subject or ignoring any questions, what time period they were from after the Glassing. What their mission was or anything about it.

Nakteti understood military secrecy, but still, it made her catching hands itch.

The work went on.

-----

"Wait, so these so-called Atrekna showed up and somehow killed off all of humanity?" The Rose Knight asked. He was sitting at a console where Nakteti had had Chuck place the basic history of Terra and the Confederacy, as well as its predecessors.

"Yes," Nakteti said. "I was briefed more than once about the entire situation."

"How?" the Knight of the Tome asked.

"When I left it was called the Archeo-Reversion Temporal Attack," Nakteti said. "Apparently the Atrekna used the majority of their strength and power when they first arrived to try to reset humanity to pre-Glassing in the mistaken belief that humanity had been altered by the Mantid into a warrior servitor."

The Knight of the Tome shook their head. "How?"

"It involved their ability to alter time, to layer multiple time periods on top of one another, as well as other temporal attacks," Nakteti said. She spread her hands. "I'll admit, much of it was beyond my understanding. Then there was the Terran Xenocide Event. We're still not sure what caused that. While the ARTA only killed off roughly 20% of humanity, the Xenocide Event was catastrophic and happened roughly a year later."

"How many did it kill?" one of the Knights of the Sword asked.

"Over ninety-nine point nine nine six percent of the survivors of the first attack. They just dropped dead. The cloning banks cut out. The SUDS was offline," Chuck said.

"Then came The Vanishing, where the majority of the remainder, largely children, just disappeared, whether or not they had a datalink," Nakteti said.

"Then follow that with Shade Night," Magnus said. He tossed a slice of apricot in the air and caught it in his mouth. "That pretty much wiped out over seventy percent of the Galactic Arm Spur," he said, chewing on the apricot piece.

"So, how did you survive?" the Rose Knight asked.

Magnus shrugged. "Just lucky, I guess," he said. "I'm Pure Strain Human, largely unaltered. Living on a primitivism world. No datalink, no superluminals, none of it. Most of my family survived, although my mother disappeared after Shade Night."

"This just seems awfully convenient for you," the Rose Knight said.

"It's been anything but convenient," Nakteti said. "It threw the entire Galactic Arm Spur into chaos. Set back the war effort against the Atrekna and the PAWM both, nearly caused the surrender of the Unified Council to fail. That's not even counting over a dozen species attempting to take over former Terran systems."

She squeezed her blade with her gripping hands. "Catastrophic is a better term," she said.

Chuck looked up. "Michael says it's time to fire off the disruptor. That will separate the oldest temporal layer from the rest."

"It should also start up the master massive catastrophic trauma processing system," the Knight of the Tome said. "That should allow the repair teams to start fixing things."

Nakteti stood up, brushing her hands off. Magnus threw half of the remaining apricot to his sister, tossed the seed into the reclamator, then shoved the rest into his mouth.

Chuck nodded.

The Arch-Angel materialized. "I cannot proceed without master authorization."

The Rose Knight stepped forward. "Proceed."

Michael looked at the Knight. "Authority rejected."

The Arch-Angel turned to Nakteti. "Do you wish to proceed."

"Initialize," Nakteti said.

Michael flickered as there was a loud thrum that Nakteti felt in her bone marrow rather than her skin. She tasted sweet cherry-plums and tinfoil for a moment.

"Temporal Layer Zero separation confirmed," Michael said. "Uploading necessary tasks for next separation."

Nakteti just nodded, turning away.

Her hack into the armor had let her see the look of fury on the Rose Knight's face when Michael had rejected his authority, and the deepening rage, to the point his eyes began glowing amber, when Nakteti's authority had been accepted.

She filed that away as a problem that would soon manifest.

The work went on as the two temporal layers separated.

At the Zero Layer, damaged systems, repaired by Team Three's remnants and Nakteti's team, struggled to activate. The Zero Layer Michael managed to boot up.

The Zero Layer Michael reached out and managed to activate the master massive catastrophic trauma processing system.

The program took stock, enacting emergency protocols.

It reached out, looking for any I/O Port it could.

It found one.

-----

The garage was dim, a fire crackling in between two luxury cars that were rusted hulks.

A large burly man clad in heavy armor sat on a tree trunk he had dragged from outside, staring at the fire. One hand was idly scratching the petting nerve of a heavily armored canine unit. He held a bottle of whiskey in the other hand that he kept lifting up the bottle and pulling drinks off of.

The level of the bottle never lowered.

There were sparkles in mid-air and a series of harsh beeps, bongs, and a few electronic twangs with a background of loud static.

The man dropped the whiskey bottle as he stood up, his other hand dropping to his thigh to grab the butt of a pistol as it was deployed from the hidden compartment in the cybernetic leg. He drew it and stepped back.

The Emergency Services I/O Port in the ceiling flickered and came on.

A man made of swirling blue code stood next to the fire.

"Can anyone hear me?" he asked.

Daxin just blinked, staring at the first manifestation of the Digital Omnimessiah.