Both Nuwans and Kamuy originated from the Amanogawa galaxy. We migrated to the Great Swirl galaxy at a different time.
Amatsubune left Amanogawa due to explore but the Nuwans, being planet dwellers, probably left because of overcrowding in their home world.
The Nuwans renamed the Amanogawa galaxy as the White Spiral Galaxy to standardize with the naming conventions of the other big three consortiums.
However, this relic probably didn't belong to my Amatsubune group. Our artefacts from the White Spiral galaxy never contained quartzites.
I pointed to the relic with suspicion and asked, "Where did you find this?"
"An archaeological site of the Nuwan Capital Planet, but we have no records of interacting with another group, except your Amatsubune group. Did others of your species migrate to this area before your group?" Senator Zhuyin asked.
Our historical records never mentioned another group since arrival in Great Swirl Galaxy. If another group existed, both would have banded together for strength in numbers.
"I don't know," I replied. "They could have arrived long before us."
To my knowledge, our species, the Kamuy, loved exploration and spacefaring across the galaxies, dragging along our willing populations.
The cybernetic translator chip in my brain couldn't decipher most of the inscriptions, but gave me the closest meaning based on the structure of words.
The Nuwans are not wrong about the clues hidden within the device.
Dirt stuck in between the scripts made it harder to read. I rubbed the dirtied scripts with a finger.
A flickering male Kamuy with long silvery hair, dressed in an ancient style, appeared near me, surprising us with his sudden presence. Even my optical implant didn't have time to warn me.
I leaped out of the armchair away from the Kamuy. The two guards at the door drew their rifles to aim at the person.
Two streams of targeting red laser beams from their rifles flowed through the projection of the Kamuy with the telltale wavy reflection of a holographic projection.
"STAND DOWN!" Senator Zhuyin jumped up and yelled in panic while the Kamuy vanished.
"Damn holographic image," I cussed under my breath.
The guards withdrew the rifles and returned to their former positions.
"Hehehe, Genja, your reaction is… still… very *cough*… fast," Rong chuckled as I pulled the armchair and sat on it again.
"What was that?" Senator Zhuyin turned to some in the entourage whom were probably scientists. The hapless Nuwans nudged each other for an answer.
"Gene activation," I replied. "The device uses the same type of tech in my war cruiser start up controls and doors."
Except my war cruiser tech included droid recognition.
One of the Nuwans added their excuse quickly, "Your Excellency, so many of us have touched this device, but nothing happened."
"I thought all of you have dark hair," another scientist added. "Don't the Kamuy consider pale eyes and silvery hair as mutation defects? Because those individuals lacked an enzyme to cope with solar burns."
I smirked. "I can't speak for other Kamuy groups across the galaxies. Just because our group considers it a defect, the others might not."
In the Great Swirl galaxy, my species practiced eugenics, the art of manipulating genes in an individual and eliminating defective mutations, long after they settled here.
Not before they migrated.
That much I knew.
Amatsubune High Command, the governing body of our artificial home world, had a knack of picking out the worst and most hostile uninhabited planetary system, which they assumed nobody wanted and named it the Kamuy system.
Eugenics was their way of ensuring the survival of the fittest.
Even before I was born, the eugenicists spliced and glued my genes together to create a perfect soldier. They even changed the color of the irises in my eyes to red to denote my military class.
Unlike Senator Zhuyin and Rong, I didn't have a family. A female Kamuy never birthed me. The womb which housed me was a special cybernetic birth pod.
Cybernetic technology was a bonus before it became a norm. At first, the Kamuy used cybernetics to cure diseases until we didn't have diseases, thanks to eugenic manipulation.
Then our scientists started on cybernetic implantation to enhance our mental and physical abilities - intelligence, strength, endurance and agility.
Little did the High Command know that planetary trade revealed the little mineral treasures we mined from the Kamuy planetary system.
So hundreds of wars followed whenever the Great Swirl Council thought they had grown big enough to pick on us. However, a combination of eugenics and cybernetic technology used on bred soldiers like me, boosted our military's tactical superiority.
Each time, we hammered their asses back without the need to accept the offered help of the Nuwans, who acted as intermediaries when the Great Swirl Council waved their little flag of defeat.
Ah, the good old days.
Senator Zhuyin gestured to the device. "Do you want to see what the purpose of the device is?"
I glanced at the guards, unsure of their reactions if the Kamuy holographic image appeared again.
"Do not raise your weapons," Senator Zhuyin ordered them, and they nodded.
Reluctantly, I touched the device to activate the holographic figure of the Kamuy.
The Kamuy appeared and started speaking in a crystalline voice, "Kunnaram, kunneyomu na manuaiko raihu korap daiuzu karoetu kawaanowa amanogawa kunitsukurei siri shundarep."
Even for a neural translator, the spoken language contained used very archaic vernaculars to be translated correctly. Even though the language belonged to my species, this dialect required decoding and deconstruction to provide a clearer idea of what the Kamuy recorded.
"Senapke shandarep Tukuyomu mitu aynu kunitsu terasu," the voice continued.
Still, from the sounds alone, I detected similarities in the linguistic order, barely enough to make out what the recording said.
I lifted my finger off the device to deactivate the distracting figure for a while to think about the similar sounding words.
Senator Zhuyin leaned forward with a glint in her eye, hopeful of any clues, and asked, "Well? What did it say?"
"To be honest, I can only guess, but the language is far too old or a different archaic dialect," I replied.
"Hazard… a… guess, nothing… to lose," Rong said.
I mused about the ancient inscriptions while keeping my eye on the Nuwans who appeared jumpy. Everyone was visibly jumpy over what happened to the Inti civilisation recently.
"Kunnaram…," I trailed off as Senator Zhuyin moved forward in to listen. "Sounds like what we called the Devourers in our language… Devourers in Daiuzu… something about a moon and returning to Amanogawa, which is the White Spiral Galaxy."
The Nuwans didn't need to know that the Kamuy projection spoke about a planetary system with the third planet from a yellow dwarf star in Amanogawa.
Whoever the dead dude was, he meant to send a message to another Kamuy. Perhaps a warning to the others.
I placed my finger on the device again to see the holographic Kamuy again. Instead of the holographic figure, a spherical stellar map of the Great Swirl galaxy popped up.
"Kunneramat, kamuyetap isoytupentuka," the voice softly sang in a quaint but familiar tune, which caused my gut to twist up. "Tumukuro inay kunnaram tuimoma kasep tuye, korap koeret."
The stellar map zoomed down at a location of the Great Swirl Galaxy, which none of us had explored and changed into a holographic recording of an ancient Kamuy fleet appeared in front of a planet fleeing from a dark shadow, only to be engulfed by it.
Whoever the survivor was, he probably felt the same way as I did. His parting words, spoken in a tune, sounded like our funeral lament, ones which we recited for our fellow fallen comrades in wars.
Like the one I recited silently when I flew out of the destruction zone together with the surviving Nuwan reinforcements.
After that, the images disappeared from the room.
"T-they… died?" Rong's voice trembled as a bead of tear rolled down his wrinkled cheek.
He still remembered the tune of our funeral chant.