After a few hours of updated gunnery and fighter simulation training that evening following dinner, Jan snoozed at his comp tutor, mildly drooling on his arm. Their screens were the only glowing lights in the darkened library.
Naero finished up her own work.
Go figure.
Jan lived and breathed advanced math and interstellar physics.
History and system archeology put him to sleep. He couldn’t care less about all of the various known cultures and races in the galaxy.
Humans and near humans: gray-skinned Besh and their small ears. Red-skinned, tough Ramorians from the mining sectors. Matayans. Naivatch and their dark purple skins and strange culture. Furry, striped, and leopard-spotted Mahri and their tapered, tufted ears. Silesians and their sonorant throat bags. Zotchans and their floating hair tendrils that they used to sense and communicate with. Quick, tiny Piettos that stood only as high as your knee or hip.
True aliens, some of them not even humanoid in any way. Sleek, agile, cat-like Mndar. Feathered bird-like Quess in astonishing varieties, stoic and wise. Gigantic but gentle Moh-Karran, five meters tall with multiple eyes and tentacles. Blobby, floating, gelatinous Blurgs and their glowing brains.
Just as exhausted, but being Jan’s opposite, Naero ate up anything about alien worlds and their ways. Her parents’ love of alien cultures, archaeology, and exploration lived on in her heart.
Reality; always better than fiction.
She poured through captured classified Corps text-only files, centuries old, about the lost Ku-Shai, and the bizarre, symbiotic alliance between the two odd races. A unique partnership that led them to sustain an empire for over three thousand millennia.
Too bad the Corps stumbled upon them during a period of decline.
After several disastrous wars–bad for both sides–the Corps banded together as they had never done before and had never done since, to eradicate nearly every trace of the Ku-Shai from the known universe.
Spacers had no further contact with them. The eradication all took place in Corps space.
She couldn’t even find a picture, a vid, or even a description of what the two species looked like. The Corps did their insidious best to wipe out all information on them from all archives for some reason, and make it appear as if they had never existed.
All of their history, art, culture–everything–completely deleted.
The Corps simply couldn’t withstand any serious competition in their sectors, alien or otherwise.
Would they do the same thing to Spacers one day? Re-write history to make them vanish? Only time would tell.
Strangely enough, there was even still a bounty on Ku-Shai. Despite the fact that none had been sighted or known to exist for many decades.
Jan snored louder. Naero finally quit when she began to nod off. She dumped Jan into his quarters, and stumbled back to her own to pass out.
16
Naero dreamed and mused in flows of poetry and emotion.
Then her crazy nightmares returned, more real and horrifying than ever.
This time, she dreamed about murdering her friends.
She stalked them one by one and cut them down, shot them, throttled them, or crushed their pleading faces as they begged.
The dream was terrifying, chilling, and secretly exhilarating.
She couldn’t stop it–couldn’t break free and wake up.