New Peace, Old Song

Mobile Station Obatala came into orbit around Uloo Ulaash on a Sunday. The humans, as part of their duty as the newest members of the Great Communion of Cephalopods were charged with negotiating an environmental treaty between two main factions of Ulaash, the Ulaash Kaa and Ulaash Bah that very Monday. 

Capt. Miranda Lee was moving down the main ring hallway when Do U Kak Shahakiks, a member of the Ulaash Jur, loped out of a hallway and caught up with her.

"Good Morning, Du," said Lee.

"Kon'nichiwa" Du said. 

"Wrong setting, that's a different earth language..." she said as they moved side by side. 

"Morgen?" Du said through his translator device. 

"Totally different language family, that one..." 

"Sjon nau-chim?" 

"Not quite, but you're getting close I do speak that one!" 

"Good morning?" Du said hopefully through a digital voice that sounded oddly British. 

"That's the stuff, can you lock that for the negotiations?" Lee asked. 

English was one of the "big three" that was taught in GCoC schools; it was something of a challenge as humans... are not cephalopods and most of the GCoC members can't actually make human language sounds, but they can all understand them.

Roughly sixty years ago, the Council of the Sentient and the Bureau of Soon to Be Sentient ran a mass biological scan over all life on earth revealing MANY cephalopod signatures. Enough that they were determined to be among the "majority lifeforms" and thus was humanity categorized. 

Many culinary delights became taboo if not legislated into illegality as a result. 

"Yes commander, locked in, and thank you for choosing me and one of my kind for this treaty." 

"Seemed the wisest course, considering." 

The Ulaash Kaa and Bah were the two largest races of the planetary population; having "split" evolutionarily around seventy thousand or one million years ago, depending on who's records you believe. 

The Kaa were entirely land-based cephalopods, with four limbs they covered most of the planet except for the deserts and the high mountains, and the Bah with eight limbs lived all throughout the oceans.  

Whilst not directly locked in a power struggle, the two of them were struggling to co-exist on a planet with limited resources; a predicament the humans were more than a little familiar with. 

The Ulaash Jur were an amphibious minority with six massive coastal cities that reached into the sky and deep into the oceans, They were almost always the facilitators, the buffers, and on far too many occasions, the peacekeepers between the Kaa and Bah. 

"Yes, and we're... very fatigued by the behavior of the Deep and High," 

"The Deep?" asked Lee. 

"The Ulaash Deep and the Ulaash High?" Du clarified. 

"Oh, damn. They really improved that translator software; I ... was never told what those suffixes meant." 

"We Ulaash Jur were very much a part of the creating of software package for the Ulaash languages." 

"Jur doesn't translate?" Lee asked.

"Not easily? It's... our word." 

"What does it mean, like roughly?" 

"'Jur' is a negative suffix in both Deep and High Ulaashi. If one were to say 'A dinner Jur' it makes it a 'bad' dinner or a 'weird' dinner or a 'dry' or 'wet' dinner depending on a number of contexts. To call someone that is very much like... a slur." 

"What?" 

"We use it... differently now in our dialect. It means... 'to be of the new, in between, seeking balance, against all odds' again depending on a number of contexts."

"Why would you use such a word to start with?" Lee asked, even as she was putting it together. 

Du said something into the translator and the first part came through quickly: "Because," but the translator had to process the second part, and there was a barely audible electrical sound as it did so. 

Lee finished figuring it out and said at the same time as the translator finished. 

"Fuck them, that's why." the human and the Ulaash Jur, "said" in unison. 

They both let that hang in the air a second and then laughed as they walked all the way to the conference hall, silhouetted by the brighter lights of the exterior, Lee's taller leaner frame, and Du's translucent figure looking rather like an upside-down turnip. 

Lee's team was already there. Master Chief Horace Khan, a short powerfully built man with well-healed but still visible vacuum scars webbing all his visible skin and a lean, ropey muscled human with the pale beauty of a spacer oddly in a Planet Forces uniform.

Du didn't know them and Lee didn't recognize them.

"Attention on deck!" Khan said and snapped to attention when Lee crossed the door threshold, the ropey Planet Force soldier did the same. 

"As you were, as you were," Lee said waving the protocol away like cigarette smoke and they both relaxed. 

Khan knew she barely cared for such things when they were underway or on a mission, but he was probably making a show of it for the soldier; knowing the planet force had a reputation for being a little slapdash because their force numbered four times as many as the Navy.

"Hey, sir!" Khan said to Du. 

"Sir? I work for a living!" Du said. 

"You're learning this military culture thing fast!" Khan guffawed. 

"It's not human culture?" Du asked, worried he'd said something offensive. 

"No it is.. it's..." Khan began. 

"And this is?" Lee said, sensing the digression and heading it off. 

"Master Sergeant Jan Petterson, not Peterson," said the pale soldier. "My honorific is Mx, but you'll never use it because like the Chief, I too, work for a living." 

"Master Sergeant, here in the Navy we have rates; why are you here, exactly?" Lee said with the usual playful terseness that would get a response she could often use to gauge what kind of human she was dealing with. 

Petterson didn't miss a beat and said "Chief pinged me about making a video for this thing after you were briefed about the languages of the Deep and the High. I read the brief and crash-coursed myself on the color meanings of the whole species and figured we could save some time if not you know in terms of getting to agree to get them to see from the jump the fuck we're talking about? We know it." 

The rings around Du's spots became a sky blue, meaning an unspoken - if not unspeakable - awe or appreciation; Petterson had learned the translation of Deep and High despite it apparently not being well known. 

"How exactly?" Lee pressed, having not actually received an answer. 

"Image and video, Ma'am. That's what I do. I pulled imagery from the turn of the century up until about 2035. 

"Good call, Master Chief," Lee said simply. 

"S'why I make them credits, Ma'am," Kahn said with as much pride as a human who had survived being blown out into the dark could muster, which was quite a bit. 

"Master Sergeant, how much work to add footage from the climate wars of 2040s?" 

"Which ones?" Petterson asked flatly. 

"How many do you have footage from?" 

"All of them," Petterson said. 

"God, I love nerds. Make it happen." Lee said. 

"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Petterson said. Kahn wasn't the only one to put on a show, it would seem. 

Petterson pulled out a mobile interphase puck (MIP) that was bigger than the standard issue by about an inch in diameter and half an inch in thickness and pressed its center button, then they put on their interface visor. 

"Your guidance while I work in real time would be helpful Ma'am, can you sync with me?" 

"Sure; address and passcode?" Lee asked. 

"Address is Petterson zero one bravo two cerulean, all spelled out no spaces."

"Password?" Lee asked. 

"No password Ma'am, Media professional equipment is required to be accessible to all people at all times." 

"What?" Lee asked, taken aback. 

"Yes, Ma'am; the Trump rule. We cannot lie; we can edit and we can portray a truth, but we cannot be the truth. While no one can edit my files they are welcome to view all the sources and I tag my times, too." 

"How do you get anything done?!" Du asked. 

"If I don't ask for an opinion and it appears unsolicited I ignore it," Petterson said to Du, and then to Lee "Ma'am, can you see my system now?" 

Lee could see... everything. Two hundred years of human history in at least two hundred small screens moving constantly and the main piece, compressing it all into five minutes. 

"My god," Lee said. 

"I hope that is a complimentary 'my god,' Ma'am," Petterson said. 

"It is. I can watch you work?" Lee asked. 

"Ma'am, that's why I asked you into this space," Petterson said. 

They moved through climate war footage, cell phone footage, satellite footage, and rebels from countries fighting corporations that became so close to the government that it was hard to tell the difference.

Petterson and Lee produced this edit for the brief: 

The tipping point was the military; Brigadier General Helena Smith-Jones; an American, pulled her sidearm and said to a CEO "We don't work for you" and shot that CEO three times in the face. 

After his body fell she emptied the magazine and held the Beretta Model 92 high in the air, its slide locked back. "We are for the people!" 

It cuts to the American military working in disaster areas; linking up with other militaries - Estonia, Ukraine, Spain, Sweden, Finland, and most of the Eastern bloc to break the corporate mercenary forces coming out of Russia. 

Firefights, air strikes. While the corporate militaries were abundant, well-armed, and well funded their morale broke easily. Their lower-level personnel quit or surrendered. Higher-level, better-paid mercs with years of experience pushed for something different. 

At the behest of those seasoned mercenaries, corporations tried a different tactic in their attrition war and started directly attacking civilians.

Globally. 

They knew they needed to make a point. They knew killing distant tribes or subjugated peoples wouldn't do much. The gap was too wide. The people of Earth were fine with people dying far away. 

Urban areas and Megacities would be too difficult to fight in; the American military had been training to fight that way for a decade and shared that knowledge and training with allies old and new.  

But the suburbs? Send several teams; in large sport utility vehicles that don't stand out in the monied communities of any country. 

Kill whole families at random. 

Instill fear with something that looks close enough to stochastic terrorism as to be unpredictable but predictable enough that people could easily think "I could be next." 

Journalists who worked with the military to report the murders were targeted next. 

The strain was constant and they almost won. 

Danica Cain was a hacker and journalist who found the smoking gun. Seven Fortune five hundred companies coordinated and planned a PowerPoint presentation titled "Kill the Suburbs." Twenty-two page presentation, plus financials and target selection.

She posted it on social media right before a sniper's bullet took her life. 

The World responded. The corporations responded in kind. 

Actively setting forest fires; dumping pollution into the oceans, and killing the earth to enforce loyalty. 

A CEO went on TV and decided to say "Yes, we can kill this planet. And we will if you don't behave." 

Smith-Jones delivered an address an hour later. "Let us then, misbehave." 

They failed; they didn't plan far enough ahead. The corporations had their figureheads but the United Force Military outnumbered them even with their well-paid personal security forces. And the people supported the UFM. 

The footage cuts to a child; covered in blood, holding up a pistol with its slide locked to the rear. Jackson Lee. 

He killed the CEO who demanded good behavior and in the video, the reporter asked why. 

"They killed my family." 

Footage of more children fighting. Footage of children, teenagers, and young adults looking out onto a ruined world and wondering why. 

More footage from the climate wars. More and more poor people refused to fight for the corporations; the constant lies they had been fed finally proved false by privately owned and operated drones decimating the small villages of American Appalachia, China, Australia, Thailand, Vietnam, countries that mean more to the humans than to the Ulaash Bah or Kaa

And yet.

The video ended and the Bah and Kaa in the chamber were silent for a time. And then... they started to sing. The eight members of the Bah and the four members of Kaa all, at the same time. 

Their translators couldn't translate it, but it was a song. In rich, golden tones they sang in a common language while moving their bodies and limbs in small circles. 

"Du, is this a good thing?" Lee asked. 

"This song...has not been sung by the Bah and the Kaa at the same time in... five thousand years." 

"Is it a good thing?!" Lee insisted.  

"This is the best possible outcome. It is a song of peace of reconciliation that is only sung in sincerity. You... you humans are... wonderful." 

Lee listened to the music as it continued. The song, in translation, was of a place, a planet, and a people. 

A common people. 

They knew each other. 

Lee heard that in the song in a language that evolved light years from her home planet. She relaxed at that moment. 

And Capt. Miranda Lee inhaled and exhaled. She looked Do U Kak Shahakiks in the eye that was facing her and said "Yes, we can be." 

This was the first planetary peace the humans would broker, and not the last.