12.1: Museum of Lesser Known Galactic History pt 1

The orange sun of Vipor shone brightly the next morning as Lus trudged out of the dingy apartment building by himself. A secret comm unit disguised as an earring on his right ear connected him to the others. Wsr was already at the museum while Cewi was doing something else in the city she deemed of equal importance. Vlqtrn remained at the apartment amongst his consoles and screens to keep all the data and communication organized.

This section of the city was in pretty rough shape all around, with most of the buildings in the same state of disrepair as the one where the Runners stayed. The majority of those he passed on the street were Kremel wearing their usual dark colors and furs. A few of the kids and teenagers wore more trendy styles from the Gemini sector with colorful robes and loud hats, but those were few and far between amongst all the traditional Kremel garb.

As Lus walked, the buildings slowly became nicer and bigger, some stretching to over two dozen stories tall. A wider mix of species also appeared, with a few Nemarians wandering the streets and even the occasional Human. When the silver Corporate military uniforms started showing up in the mix, he stopped looking closely at those who passed by. It was hard to not think of his own time wearing such garments.

Eventually he arrived at their target, the Southern Reach Museum of Lesser Known Galactic History. It was a simple building, only three stories tall and not overly large, but the architecture spoke of primordial civilizations with the spiraled columns full of paintings and the oval stained glass windows that dotted the walls. He remembered learning about the Ancient Ones during school as a kid, but it was always one of those "mysteries of the galaxy" that was never going to be solved despite all the ruins available. Everyone he knew had wanted to be an Ancient One researcher at some point in their childhood. What he saw here, however, went way beyond the normal styles attributed to the Ancient Ones, and he couldn't help but wonder if it was a gimmick to draw in a larger crowd against all the competing museums.

Lus cracked the gum he was chewing. According to Wsr, it made him seem more "casual," but he felt rather silly doing it. He wore standard Human clothes that could have been found in any shopping center that catered to his species: tight fitting pants and a simple t-shirt. He also wore a hat–a ball cap that had a brim to cover the front of his face and nothing more, which he thought looked far better than the silly full brim hats Kremel tourists typically wore. Nemarians normally didn't wear any kind of headgear unless they absolutely had to since it was uncomfortable for their fins from Lus's understanding.

He greeted the ticket booth operator with a smile, hoping he seemed more relaxed than he felt. Seeing all the military officers put him on edge, even though he knew they had no reason to suspect anything about him. Lus looked the part of a casual tourist, and Vipor received millions each standard year with all the museums it boasted.

"Enjoy," the Kremel man said in a flat voice as he handed Lusac back his cryptin card. The tickets were shockingly expensive for doing something as boring as looking at old artifacts. This wasn't even one of the major museums on the planet, but the prices were still rather inflated.

Luckily, it wasn't his personal cryptin he was spending, just the Argo's crew fund, so he couldn't complain too much.

Inside the building, Lus was a little overwhelmed with all the things to see. Everywhere he looked there was some colorful object depicting something about some random species, and his eyes were starting to hurt from the mess of colors. The Argo was rather bland in comparison, and even the city hadn't come close to this level of flamboyance.

The museum was organized according to a general timeline, and Lus knew that what they were looking for would be in the middle the entire thing, inside the section of the exhibits which represented things from in between the fall of the Ancient Ones and the rise of the Nemarians and eventually all the other three species. But Lus didn't rush to where he knew their target was. Instead, he took his time wandering through the halls of the museum, forcing himself to pretend he cared about all the dusty old artifacts and art pieces. Some exhibits were literally just old bricks from civilizations that crumpled even before the Ancient Ones, people who might have been the first colonizers if not for their own folly.

As he walked through the museum, Lus was careful to subtly find all the security cameras he could. After each section, he'd find a blind spot and mark them on the map he took from the ticket booth. Once he got back to the apartment, Vlqtrn would compile his and Wsr's notes to get a full picture of what they would be walking into that night.

Eventually he finished off the long series of hallways dedicated to the Ancient Ones, and he could finally safely move to the large room dedicated to that in-between period so few people cared about. Along one of the walls, away from any of the really cool artifacts, sat a shelving unit protected by thick glass. Their prize waited on one of the lower shelves, a small plaque listing it as a pottery fragment from some early society wiped out long before Nemarian colonization.

Lus did his usual scan for security cameras, but he also took a couple of extra minutes near the exhibit to check for other measures surrounding the shelves, including a quick check to see if there was anything inside the glass walls to worry about. He mentally noted what appeared to be alarms before moving on to something else and spending even more time pretending to study it in hopes of keeping suspicion low. When he got to the next stairwell, he communicated the more important bits to Vlqtrn and then marked the map as he had before. Now all that was left was to finish wandering the museum and keeping track of cameras as he went.

He just had to make sure none of the day guards caught him doing something so suspicious, or else the entire mission would be a bust. Keeping up his casual appearance, Lusac started into the corridors dedicated to the first living colonizer of the galaxy: the Nemarians.

According to Lus's history teacher back when he was a kid, Humans were the unofficial original colonizers after the Ancient Ones. Their ancestors were from some other, far away galaxy and had come here a millenia ago, before even the Nemarians had started into the stars, but since they only sent one ship to colonize a single planet, the first Humans had been forced to rebuild from the ground up, centuries behind where their homeworld was. That delayed them from joining the Cinder Rock Galaxy Collective until long after both the Nemarians and Shamayim had advanced to the point of starting to travel the far reaches of the galaxy. The Kremel then advanced up only a hundred years or so later, marking the final addition to the Collective.

He was at the start of the section going over the meeting of the Nemarians and Shamayim, including their initial treaty that created the Collective when someone called out to him.

"Arten? Is that you?" the man said.

Lus's eyes went wide as he studied the plaque before him. He didn't know anyone who would refer to him by only his last name except…

He turned to face the person who had spoken, a Human male only a year or two older than himself wearing a silver uniform. Lusac recognized him immediately as Shent Resiw, one of his close friends from his basic training when he was with the Corporate Military.

"Resiw." Lusac forced a smile. "How are you? They have you rotting away at a museum instead of in the action?"

"Look who's talking," Shent replied as he grabbed his hand and shook it vigorously. "How have you been? How's the 647th Battalion doing? I heard you guys were out in the Aura sector taking out Fed factories."

"Good. Good," Lus lied. "Yeah. I'm here on leave for a few days, and then back to the bombing."

Shent nodded, still grinning. "It's so good to see you, Arten. With the kinds of casualties those rural sectors are spitting out, I wasn't sure you'd make it out in one piece."

Exactly why I left, Lus thought to himself while maintaining a false grin. "You ended up pushing paper for some executive, right? What are you doing here?"

"I handle death notifications," he said, letting the smile fade a little. "Which is funny actually. I was able to set up a system that warned me if you and the others from the training squad passed through the office, and I swear I got yours a couple of years ago, not long after we graduated."

"Ugh. I remember that. We were ambushed on some dusty moon, and I got separated from my team during our retreat. I ended up taking a little spill off the cliff that mashed up my id chip. I guess Clvq saw me, and they assumed the worst. I ended up in a hospital for a couple of months as a Nameless until I was well enough to explain. You wouldn't believe the paperwork required to come back from the dead." Lus chuckled. "But of course, I can't imagine you set the alerts up to go both ways so how would you have known about the mix up?"