The non-humanoids were five-limbed. They had been carded to a makeshift camp not too far from the river that had run blood-dark at Vareia’s arrival shortly after the final battle. The Circle of Suns had changed the parameters of resettling planets brought into the fold: a sampling of the original culture was to be preserved. Vareia was here to choose the individuals that were to be preserved with it.

Vareia had not exactly been trained for her assignment, but she had been given the necessary knowledge through her mind-graft. The only trouble with mind-grafting was that it didn’t give you the skill and experience. It was book learning. However, as Cultural Documentations suffered from a constant lack of soldiers, it was the preferred method.

The Circle of Suns’ vanguard had broken the non-humanoids’ language, and Vareia had fed the translation AI to her personal screen. Her objective sounded simple enough: selecting individuals of all genders, preferably young ones so that they could still reproduce. The last part would be easy, as these non-humanoids were capable of birthing offspring until their natural death.

Genetic diversity was of no direct concern. The bio-med engineers of the Circle of Suns would control the population anyway, once it was established. Artistry, craftsmanship, and historical knowledge, however, those were the things that Vareia knew she had to select for.

Guards brought the first individual into the structure Vareia had chosen for her interviews. The room was large, the ceiling vaulted and painted with intricate designs. Vareia admired them and wondered at their meaning.

The non-humanoid moved on all their five limbs. The upper parts of the limbs were wreathed in metal links, beads, and other knick-knacks strung on threads that wound around rounds of cloth, pattern-dyed and bright. The fabric would once have been pristine, but it was smudged now, torn. Vareia had gathered from the reports she’d received through the mind-graft that this was the equivalent of clothing for them. The non-humanoid’s eyes were three dark jewels, set in the upper part of their body.

The non-humanoid’s skin fluctuated from dark blue to teal as they approached Vareia, who sat on a crate, as the invading force had not thought to bring any extra chairs.

“Hello,” Vareia said. Her screen’s AI translated and simultaneously scanned the non-humanoid’s chip.

“Will you kill me?” the non-humanoid asked.

“I want to talk to you,” Vareia said, ignoring the knot in her stomach.

“You killed the term unknown,” the AI translated, sadly unhelpful.

“We are soldiers, and we follow orders,” Vareia said. That’s what she had taught herself to recite in front of the mirror in her room at the Academy.

“You killed the term unknown.” It occurred to Vareia that the translation AI would not easily pick up on inflection. This had not been necessary as the planet and its non-humanoid inhabitants had never posed a significant threat to the Circle of Suns. Vareia sighed. She hoped the AI would learn to tell questions apart from accusations sooner rather than later.

“I need you to answer a few questions for me,” Vareia said. She proceeded with the protocol.

“Long day?”

Vareia looked up from her untouched food. “Aren’t all the days long on this planet?” She hadn’t been looking for conversation, but sheer exhaustion had made her sit down at a table in the mess hall. She had hoped her uniform would keep the soldiers away. She was not one of them, after all, not a fighter who got her boots soaked in the gore of the battlefield. The officer standing on the other side of the table threw a disarming smile at her.

“Mind if I sit?” he said.

“Of course not.”

He put his plate down across from her, sat on the bench. “You missed most of the fighting, you know. As I understand it, they capitulated,” he said before he started on a yellow brownish mush that might be mashed potatoes in a best-case scenario.

“So I hear.” She had received a report through the mind-graft. After the capitulation, the Circle of Suns wanted the number of the non-humanoids reduced quickly. There simply was not enough room in the makeshift camp from which Vareia was to make her selection to be idle about it.

“They don’t know the Circle has ordered resettlement. Or they don’t understand what it means.” Something about the officer eating made Vareia sick to her stomach. She nodded without saying anything. “You’re Kadan, right?” he said between spoonfuls. “You’re small, but you have the coloring. Not much of an accent though.”

Vareia reevaluated the officer before she answered. His skin looked a lot like hers, and so did his eyes and hair. He was the kind of tall you got growing up on a low-g world. “I was born on Kada, but they filtered me into the Integration and Education Program.”

The officer nodded. “There are stories about Integration and Education.” He leaned in close. “A private on my first campaign came straight out of the Academy. She got her head shot off by the hostiles, and I swear when she bled out she looked happy. Still, much better than what those poor bastards are getting, wouldn’t you say?”

Technically, Vareia should have reported him for this, even if his tone of voice sounded innocent enough. “The Circle of Suns acts with the best interest of its citizens at heart,” she said. She dropped her head for emphasis.

The officer smiled at her. “You’re afraid I’m testing you. Don’t be. My name is Sadar Kanus. I wasn’t born with it, but Kadan names are too hard to pronounce. How about I come by your quarters later? I have some whisky I’m willing to share. It’s not good, but I find good becomes less important the more you work in the mud.”

So that was all he wanted. Intimacy with a familiar-looking face, a memory of home, however faint. Vareia could understand that. Sometimes she wanted to be back at the Academy too, live as a cadet forever.

Sadar was surprisingly discreet. Not that what they were doing was an issue as far as the Military Command Code was concerned. The sad thing was, Vareia wasn’t sure which she enjoyed more, Sadar or the whisky; the soldiers had shot the non-humanoids she couldn’t use straight after the interviews, even if she had given orders for it to be done where the rest wouldn’t see. The others could still hear the screams and the shots. Vareia had kept count. She’d passed the heaped corpses on her way to the mess hall. Sadar’s body on hers was as close as she could get to forgetting.

It was still just the crate. Vareia had asked for a chair, but obviously her needs were not a top priority. The non-humanoid in front of her was a child, judging by their size.

“Do you know many stories of your people?”

They kept their limbs close together, tucked in almost. Their skin shone a dark, inky blue. “My mother told me many stories.”

“That’s good. Do you–“

“She told me everything about the great bird that lives under the earth.”

That sounded odd, but stories had a tendency toward oddness. Not that Vareia had ever been told any. She checked the translation AI just in case, but it seemed to work properly. “That sounds like a wonderful story. I don’t know that one.” Because I never knew my mother long enough to even learn her tongue, let alone hear her stories.

“I can tell you! And I know more too; do you want to hear about the term unknown? Or the moon that ate the sun, that’s my favorite. I can tell you now!” Their skin shimmered a lighter shade, excitement.

Vareia smiled, held up her hands. “No, no, you don’t have to do that right now. I just wanted to know if–“

“Please don’t kill me. I can do whatever you want. I could be your servant. Or your pet. I can be good.”

Vareia could feel a knot wind itself tight and tighter in her throat. “I won’t kill you. I won’t. I need your stories.” She added the appropriate notation next to the child’s ID scan. “It will be fine. They’ll take you back to the others now.” She signaled to the soldiers. “That’s the last one before lunch,” she called after them and watched their backs recede. The child’s eyes flashed a dark look back at her as if they wanted to ask, did you lie to me? But Vareia hadn’t. She wasn’t going to kill another child before lunch.

She spent her hour sitting on the crate, trying to force herself through the meditation routines they had taught her at the Academy.

“Hello,” she said to the first non-humanoid they brought in after lunch. Thankfully, they weren’t a child. Vareia’s voice was reasonably steady.

“Here, you finish; I think you need it more than I do,” Sadar said. He was naked, the hair on his chest matted with sweat.

Vareia took the bottle from him and downed the last swig of amber liquid. “Too bad there isn’t any more.” She lay on her back, stared up at the ceiling of her quarters. It was a standard pod, three meters by five meters. The bed was narrow, but that had never deterred soldiers from sharing, and Vareia enjoyed the smell and warmth of Sadar’s skin next to her. His breath was peace and his arms, ever ready to hold Vareia, were comfort. In her liquor haze, she imagined that time would stop and that this small pod could stretch into forever. Vareia wanted something from Sadar, but what it was precisely was a term unknown to her.

“They resupply soon, haven’t you heard? They’ll also send a good portion of the soldiers elsewhere. There just isn’t much more to do here.” He ran a hand down her arm, caught her hand with his.

“Standard protocol; minimal military presence during the first standard year of resettlement,” Vareia recited as if tested by an instructor. The world was spinning; she’d drunk too much, eaten too little.

“That’s the one.” He massaged her knuckles with his thumb. His hands were rough, a soldier’s hands. Vareia had soft hands. “How long do you think you’ll be here?” Sadar pushed his other arm under Vareia’s head so she could use it as a pillow.

She did the numbers in her head. She needed to select three thousand individuals with a five percent margin, so that meant she would select closer to 3,150 individuals. She knew she couldn’t select that number exactly, as it would be flagged in her report. She had managed to interview about one hundred individuals per day, and she selected an average of fifteen to preserve. She had never done the math before. “About half a standard year,” she said. Her vision was blurring. She remembered the stink of flies, offal, blood. She had the number of deaths in her head now, too.

“Oh well. I’ll see if I can stay behind as well; I thought maybe we could talk about spending some off duty time together. I don’t know, maybe you want to go to Kada with me?”

The place she’d never known. She had imagined her parents still lived there, had given her away as a peace offering to the Circle of Suns. At the Academy, Vareia had pulled a prank once. She had managed to manipulate a database so it spouted nonsense words during a command code exam instead of the paragraphs the cadets were supposed to have learned: “The pink cat loves tea and celery; explain.”

After her prank, her house officer had sat her down and reprimanded her. Your parents were shot for violent disobedience, and I would like to think the Academy has taught you better. Her dreams broken, just like that. She found out during her first year at Cultural Documentations that she had been selected for the position in part because of that prank. They had to put you in solitary for a month and restrict your calories, but on a technical level, it was impressive work. Outstanding, really, a general had told her before their first mission together.

And now, here she was, obedient; obedient, and stinking of guts and blood and murder. Sadar next to her thought she deserved more than cheap liquor and a cheaper fuck. “Don’t bother. I don’t care about going to some second-rate planet, and I don’t care about getting any closer to you than this.” He didn’t say anything, but she could feel a rigidness settle over his body. “I think you should go back to your own bunk. Now.” She turned on her side and listened to Sadar get up and gather his clothes.

“Every Kadan in the military should strive to follow your example,” Sadar said before leaving. His voice had the sharp edges of hurt, honed by the Kadan accent he spoke with, an accent that had never touched Vareia’s tongue.

At least Vareia didn’t see his face. It was one less horror to live in her memory.

The crate forced Vareia to sit straight, but after a while, her back still hurt. In front of her, a bead maker told Vareia about their trade. Vareia didn’t really listen. She was typing on her personal screen. The pink cat loves tea and celery. It had been easier at the Academy. This time around, she knew she would be shot if someone figured out what she was doing.

The bead maker had stopped talking three lines of code ago. Their color was drifting to dark, and they were shifting their weight from limb to limb. Vareia glanced up at them. “Do you know the story about the great bird that lives under the earth?” Vareia asked.

The bead maker’s skin flurried into a lighter emerald. “I do. The bird sleeps for many years, and then they wake and howl and cry. Their wings stretch, and the earth breaks where the feathers slice through.”

Vareia nodded along while she spun the code from her fingers. She double checked her work with her mind-graft, checked the time. She had spent as long with the bead maker as she could without making it stand out in her report. “Thank you,” she said and noted that they should be preserved.

The pink cat loves tea and celery. What Vareia was trying to do would take time. She had to do it right. The statistics of her work had to look perfectly normal while she did it. She would have to order non-humanoids shot, because there could be no irregularities in her report. The number was glaring in her head. She built the code as fast as she could.

“Hello,” Vareia said. Finally, after six weeks, she could lean back in a real chair.

“Hello,” the child said uncertainly. “Why am I back here?”

Vareia smiled, but she didn’t know if the child could read any meaning in her face. “I would like you to tell me a story. I need to hear a story to understand your people better.”

“Does that mean I am your pet now?”

Vareia shook her head. “I’d just like you to tell me a story. Would you?”

A long pause, uncertainty. “Which one would you like to hear?”

“Your favorite one; the one your mother told you over and over.” A cruel request. Vareia didn’t know if their mother still lived. If they would be able to reunite with their mother.

Another pause. “The story of the term unknown starts at the mother spring, where all rivers come from. One day, the child of a war leader wanted to get from one bank of the Mother-River to the other, and they did not wish to swim and get all wet, so this is the story of how they built a bridge.” The child relaxed, their color thinning like ink in water.

“What does this mean?” Vareia said, making the translation AI repeat the term unknown back to the child.

A slight fluctuation in their color. “A person that does the right thing. A person that protects others. A person that sacrifices themself for the good of all.”

Vareia repeated it in the child’s language as best she could. “My language doesn’t know a person like that,” Vareia told the child.

The child’s skin dipped into dark, swirled back to light. Before they could speak, the door flew open and a group of soldiers came in.  Their boots broke the patterned stone that floored the building Vareia still knew nothing about. With luck, she never would.

Without luck, I never will either, because I will be dead, Vareia thought, but kept her face neutral the way she had learned at the Academy. Sadar led the group, his tallness making his strides the longest.

“Lieutenant Scegal,” he said, addressing her formally. “We need to evacuate. The orbital sensors have picked up an instability in the planet’s crust.”

The pink cat loves tea and celery. “What is that supposed to mean? I have an assignment to complete,” Vareia said. Her heart was beating fast with elation.

“The Circle of Suns will abandon this planet until its tectonics have stabilized. These are our orders.”

And no soldier would ever argue with orders, this Vareia had learned. She got up from her chair, nodded. Then she shut down the translation AI.

“You protected me,” the child said. By then, Vareia could make out just enough of their language to understand. Their color was periwinkle pale. Then they called her the word Vareia’s language didn’t know.

“We might have time to put down a few of them. It would be a mercy,” Sadar said.

Vareia forced a precise leisureliness into her movements as she collected her things. There was a data stick that contained the code that she had written, the code that had made the orbital satellites think there was tectonic activity here, vicious as a great bird that slept beneath the earth and was about to wake. It couldn’t be found on her, but at the same time, Vareia couldn’t abandon it. It might yet be useful. “No,” she said. “If we are to leave, we leave. The non-humanoids lived here, they may as well die here.”

A pause stretched in which only the child’s uncertain skin gave anything away. If Sadar was offended by Vareia’s words, he didn’t show it on his face, a face so much like hers.

“Yes, lieutenant,” Sadar said, and Vareia relaxed.

“If you’ll kindly show me the way to the evac location,” Vareia said.

The soldiers nodded curtly, turned, walked away. Sadar slowed his step so he could walk next to Vareia. She glanced back over her shoulder at the child that stood there, baffled in their light blue hue.

“Perhaps I was too rash before,” Vareia said in a low voice as they exited the building and sunlight splashed into her face. “I might wish to visit Kada after all.” She told herself she said it so he would forget how she had looked back at the child.

Sadar glanced at her. “Everyone should see their birth-world,” he said carefully.

Vareia nodded as further conversation was futile. A hurried orderliness drove the Circle of Suns’ soldiers back to the ships from whose guts they had spilled just weeks before. Vareia knew the Circle of Suns wouldn’t be gone forever, but time was the only gift she could give these people, who knew a language full of things the Circle of Suns had tried to forget.

Absentmindedly, Vareia patted the data stick in her pocket. “The cat loves tea and celery,” she mumbled.

“Pardon me?” Sadar said, with his accent full of round vowels.

“Nothing,” Vareia said. “Nothing at all to worry about.”