Chapter Ninety-Nine (Nakteti) (1/2)
The day was bright and clear, heat pounding down to be reflected by the golden sands surrounding them. The little wheeled ground-car, with no doors, not top, just belts to hold the driver and passengers inside of it, made growling noises as Major Carnight drove it along a winding road.
Nakteti could see shards of bluish-green glass and shivered.
Lossglass she thought to herself, using the Terran name for it. How they ever figured out how to recover a planet's biosphere from a glassing, I will never understand.
”So, explain to me where we are going,” Nakteti said.
”You said you wanted to see our ancient human ruins, so I'm driving you out to see some of the oldest ones that are still left,” Major Carnight said.
”I have always wanted to come here,” A female Terran in the back said, her hair whipping around her face from the wind the vehicle's velocity caused. She was wearing adaptive camouflage and had a magack rifle in her hands with goggles over her eyes like everyone else in the little 'Jeep” did. ”Things just kept coming up.”
”Yeah, it gets like that,” The other passenger, a male Terran, said. He was looking at the surroundings, but to Nakteti it felt more menacing, more sharp edged, than just looking at the surroundings.
She still couldn't believe that suddenly she was important enough to rate even more bodyguards. There were six of the giant black Mechaneks running ahead, beside, and behind the vehicle, their feet sending up puffs of sand as they ran silently.
Sonic baffling, she thought to herself, turning away from the Mechaneks and the sand to stare out the windshield at more sand.
Finally the vehicle turned the corner, around a large cliff, and it all came into sight. A massive valley in the sandstone, some of the sandstone coated with a thin layer of lossglass. Ahead were pillars, some fallen, some still standing; giant pyramids; buildings and statues carved from solid rock.
Standing guard were fierce looking armors, with elaborate head dresses and carrying staffs that crackled with energy.
Major Carnight stopped the vehicle and got out. ”We walk from here. They don't want vehicles profaning this valley.”
”What is this place?” Nakteti asked as she got out.
”The Valley of the Kings, where an ancient kingdom once buried their dead. There's ancient legends of warpgates, but nobody's found any actual evidence despite this being one of the better places to put them before the Loss. The magnetic field back then would have supported a warpgate quite easily,” one of the Mechaneks said softly. ”The battles fought here were so legendary even great religious figures once fought in these sands.”
Nakteti looked at the architecture around her as she slowly walked with the others. She knew they were walking slowly because of her stride. Human strides were roughly a meter, hers were half that.
Watching historical videos and taking part in historical eVR's had given Nakteti a certain awe of the human stride.
She had seen recordings of something called ”The Olympic Games” which were divided into four categories. 'Natural' which required a genescan, 'Biomod' which only allowed certain genetic modifications and bio-engineered tissues, 'Cyber' which allowed and required certain cybernetic parts, and lastly: Unlimited, where there were no restrictions.
It was the 'Natural' that intrigued her. The idea of so many different nations, so many different planets now, all competing in a two month long series of events was just dazzling to her.
She had watched something called 'The Marathon', a 42.195 kilometers (26.219 mile) race where the athlete bellowed out ”God Save the Mantid Queen for We Won't” at the end of it, had been stunning to watch. She knew she was 1.25 meters high. That meant the entire race was 33,750 of her body lengths. How fast they had run that competition had been a thing of awe for her to watch.
Watching those human athletes run that race had been fascinating and horrifying.
One hour and fifty-two point three one minutes to run that course.
Nakteti had ridden in vehicles that traveled slower than that.
She knew that the human stride, their ability to run distances that were an incomprehensible feat to anyone else, was critical in what had fashioned humans.
She had discovered that the record for running a thousand miles was nine days, 20 hours. That human soldiers were required to run in full gear for miles, even with modern technology.
The Mechaneks surrounding her, when they had biological unmodified bodies, had been required to run mile after mile until they could run 3.5 miles in full gear and still fight at the end of it. If one of her people had been required to do that, their hearts would have given out before they had traveled a mile.
She discovered that humans had the ”Lunar Mile”, an event where a human wore goggles to protect the eyes, noseplugs, and ran a mile across the vacuum of their moon as some kind of weird bragging right.
Every soldier around her had the Lunar Mile under their belt.
Which made her painfully aware of just how short her stride was as they walked into the valley.
Their abilities to eat and drink as they ran or walked was weird to her. She had watched 'Primitivism Reenactments' of hunting, where humans would just walk after an animal to either capture or kill it. She had watched the male turn around, and walking backwards, urinate, then turn back around and keep walking.
Toward the end she had felt bad for the animal. No matter how far it ran the human just walked up while it was eating or trying to sleep. Over and over and over, until the creature just gave up.
But humans never did.
She was learning a lot about her hosts, about the people who had been moving her people to a planet that she had purchased, who had helped them set up the colony.
Now she had wanted to see ancient human ruins.
Large, was the biggest thing that came to mind. It made sense to her, a large people, the Terrans liked to impress one another with how large something else was. The 'marathon' was large, the 'Lunar Mile' was large, and everything they built was large.
When she saw the great pyramids of stone she stopped and stared.
They're so huge, was the first thing that came to mind. They had damage to them. Weather, time, and the patina of bluish-green glass from having been exposed to the glassing, which their sheer size and what they had been made of helped them survive.
”Those are tombs?” Nakteti asked, staring.
”To keep the great Priest Kings placated. We don't know that much any more, but it was a combination of respect and fear that made their people build these vast tombs to imprison their dead God-Kings, called Pharaohs,” one of the Mechaneks, Gunnery Sergeant Bowman answered. ”They laid curses on the tombs, which slowly took the lives of all who desecrated them through terrible rotting diseases.”
”Don't forget that sometimes the mummies of the Pharaoh's guard would come to life and kill those who stole from the tomb,” The female Terran, Lieutenant Krikov added.
”Never proven,” the Mechanek said.
Nakteti just stared at the huge pyramids, the massive statues, as the Terrans started bickering around her about whether or not mummies actually came to life and attacked people, whether or not they could turn water to blood, or summon swarms of locusts, or call forth sandstorms that they devoured entire kingdoms with.
They all argued about mummies, curses, Gods, possibly warp gates and alien invasions/slavery, religious wars, a dead sea being parted, how purrbois were holy icons, and more as Nakteti stared in wonder at everything around her.
Because she was a xenodiplomat the fierce looking guards let her, and her alone, into one of the giant pyramids, two of the fierce looking guards, a Terran body with the head of a black canine, following her after warning her not to speak.
She looked at the artwork on the walls, the golden treasures, the jars containing everything from spices and grain to gold and organs. The place felt ancient in a way that she couldn't describe afterwards, and the golden sarcophagus holding the mortal remains of ancient Terran kings were strangely frightening.
They felt like they were judging her ability to lead her people.
As she left she twisted her hands on the grasping stick, thinking about what she had seen.
These structures were built with muscle. No graviton, no anti-grav, just muscle, round sticks, mud, and a whip.
She stood just outside the tomb, staring at her Terrans. The six Mechaneks, all men and women that had been 'killed' or volunteered to be full conversion cyborgs. The three others. Two of them 'bioborgs', their bodily organs replaced by vat-grown tissue designed for combat, the last Major Carnight, who was apparently about as close as someone in the Terran military got to 'Pure Strain Human' and was still in service.
She could hear them loudly discussing whether or not a mummified priest could breathe a cloud of bees on an unbeliever.
They were waving their hands and arms, their body language aggressive, but she had been around humans long enough to know that things weren't about to get violent, they were all fully engaged in the discussion and were bringing their natural human aggressiveness into the discussion.
Nakteti moved up and stood with them. The conversation trailed off with an ”well, I think they could” and they all looked at her.
”Did you find what you were looking for?” Major Carnight asked, kneeling down in front of her.