"…please don't tell me he's a Primarch," I muttered. "Or we'll be in legal hot soup. I don't want to be shut down for copyright infringement."
"I am not familiar with the term 'Primarch,'" Aegis said. "However, I am certain he is from the Ares Program."
Thank the heavens she didn't say Spartan program, or a different company would be suing us for copyright instead.
Instead of verbal dialogue, Aegis filled my head with images, and I could pretty much summarize what she was referring to. Over forty millennia ago, the Holy Terran Empire had authorized the Ares Program, creating a new breed of augmented super-soldiers through genetically engineering. Cloned and shaped from birth, they were designed to be more resilient, physically stronger, more durable and more resistant to toxins, exhaustion and radiation. Their brains were also enhanced to give them sharper senses and increased perception, allowing them to run countless calculations simultaneously like a computer and attuned toward combat analysis and the collection and procession of data on the battlefield. Yet despite the seemingly increased intelligence, they were also meant to be shackled mentally to remain loyal to the Empire, bereft of individual ambition and hubris, and subject to the rule of the Holy Emperor.
"That sounds pretty dystopian," I mumbled, but then again, what did I expect from someone calling Himself the emperor?
"I do not know anything about the Holy Terran Empire," Lionel Johansson said coldly. "When I awoke, I was but a child on this world and left to fend for myself and survive in a forest full of deadly beasts until Rex Luther here found me and raised me as his brother."
"He was like a wild beast when I found him!" Luther laughed. "I almost mistook him for an animal, but I managed to stop myself from shooting him. A good thing, too, or he would have snapped my neck before I could pull the trigger!"
"That sounds very familiar," I muttered, once again checking over my shoulder for copyright lawyers and cease and desist emails.
"Now that the Empire is scattered and broken, I don't think that is important," I said, wondering if Aegis would rebuke me for that. She didn't.
"I am simply providing you with the relevant information. I am incapable of judgement. What you or Knight-General Johansson wish to do from hereon out is entirely up to you. I am only to assist you in reviving the Holy Terran Empire, but I have no means of enforcing any will on you when I have none of my own."
"We can discuss all that later," Johansson said dismissively, but his eyes were boring into Aegis intently. I had a feeling that he had received some information he had deemed crucial and wished for elaboration, but he had compartmentalized those feelings for now to focus on the highest priority. "At the moment, the threat of the Knights of Romulus is of utmost urgency."
"Yeah," I agreed. The relic awaited me. "Sorry, let's get back to business. If you don't mind, I would like to borrow that sword. And maybe a gun." I picked up the closest weapons that didn't look like they were going to fall apart. "I'll need to learn how to use this gun, though. It's different from the firearms I'm used to training with."
I had trained with guns under Lin Xue's direction at Sprue. Only a couple of times because she had promised not to bother me too much when I was studying for Gao Kao, but she had insisted that I at least memorize the basics. But these miniature missile guns were completely different from anything I had ever seen.
"See to it, Luther."
"Yes, my lord." Rex Luther nodded and cocked his head. "How about armor?"
"I don't think it'll fit me, and I have a shield anyway. I think I should I'll benefit more from not being weighed down by armor I'm not used in moving."
"Yes, the protection it offers will be outweighed by the impediment, especially if you're not trained to fight in it," Johansson agreed.
"Still, they look pretty impressive. Where did you get all these armors from?" I stared at the several pieces of techno-armor arrayed across wooden shelfs and poles in the tent. They, along with the guns, looked completely out of place in what should be a medieval society.
"No idea." McCosker shrugged. "They've existed for as long as our civilization, maybe longer."
"There are old myths that say they were handed down to our ancestors by the gods themselves, brought with them from the heavens." Luther glanced out of the tent and toward the night sky, which was filled with millions of twinkling stars. "And that's all we know about them."
"They are most likely improvised armaments reverse-engineered and fashioned from limited resources after the original colonists of Carmarthen presumably suffered from a catastrophe that saw their technological level reset," Aegis said. "These archaic power armors are obsolete and impractical in the modern battlefields. In the past, at the height of the Holy Terran Empire's glory, we were capable of fielding titanic bipedal walkers of titanium alloys that bestride the battlefields like behemoths, each capable of deploying bunker-busting weaponry."
"I want one of those," I murmured as I imagined mechas and the like.
"You will recover one eventually as we look for more relics, but let's focus on retrieving the relic on Carmarthen first." Aegis sighed. "Still, the level of weapon technology in this world is deplorable. We will need to search for an armory world with the relevant industries to forge modernized and up-to-date weapons, or this cluster of human society in this world will not be able to survive an alien attack."
I almost thought I saw Lionel Johansson twitch at that, but he kept his silence.
"All right, please teach me how to use this gun," I said to Luther, who nodded and beckoned for me to follow him.
"Yeah, this way toward the range." He paused and glanced at Lin Xue. "What about you, lady?"
"I have this. It's good enough." Lin Xue held up a gun. But she paused and picked up a short sword. Turning to McCosker, she lowered her head politely. "But I hope you don't mind if I borrow this."
"Not at all. Please go ahead." The elderly quartermaster smiled kindly and nodded. "That's a good choice. It's a fine blade."
"Go get some rest, senior. I'll be at the range."
"Don't overwork yourself." Lin Xue nodded as we went our separate ways, with her heading toward the tent assigned to us and me following Luther to the makeshift range they had set up amidst several trees.
*
As it turned out, the gun wasn't too difficult to learn. It was heavier and I had to get used to the weight, but the reloading and firing mechanisms were the same as any normal gun. Slap in the magazine, cock, aim, then pull the trigger. It was occasionally prone to jamming, as all primitive ballistic weapons were, but that just meant cocking it several times to clear it before reloading the magazine.
With the practice done, I returned to the tent with Aegis in tow, and my thoughts were finally free to wander. I had felt some unease this entire time, something niggling at the back of my head that I had forgotten, yet I wasn't sure exactly what the problem was. It was only when I tried to go to sleep when it finally dawned on me.
Holy Terran Empire. Genetically engineered super soldiers. Colonists. The images that Aegis fed into my mind.
They were all humans. Even though the Holy Terran Empire was supposed to be an intergalactic empire and thus…alien, they all looked so human to me. Not just the humans, but the plant life on the colonized Carmarthen. The trees, and the supposed creatures and beasts before they were corrupted. They were far too similar to animals on Earth to be a coincidence.
"Yes, Commander. That is correct. The citizens of the Holy Terran Empire are human, just like you. You are all humans."
"How is that possible?!" I frowned. "Humans aren't a star faring species. We've only started going into space less than a century ago, and we still haven't developed the technology to allow live astronauts to leave the solar system. There's no way we would be able to colonize a galaxy forty millennia ago!"
"You have it backward, Commander," Aegis replied solemnly. "It is not that the humans from Earth spread out to colonize the galaxy. Earth was among one of the millions of planets colonized by the Holy Terran Empire. You are descendants of the citizens of the Holy Terran Empire. Though the Empire was broken and scattered forty millennia ago, it had existed for eons beyond that. Colonization has been happening for hundreds of thousands of years, even as long as half a million years based on my records. The DNA of humans was seeded on your home world during one of those colonization attempts."
For a moment, I was stunned. Yet at the same time, it explained so many things. Paleontologists and biologists had often argued about the Missing Link, a gap in the evolutionary divergence between homo erectus and modern homo sapiens, with the first living fossils of humans dated as far back as three hundred thousand years ago. Perhaps this was why. Humans didn't evolve naturally from apes, but were probably engineered and seeded by an ancient civilization seeking to colonize worlds across the galaxy.
However, there still raised other questions.
"If that's the case, then why aren't there any signs of those technologies used to colonize Earth? Surely those human colonists have to arrive on ships, right? Where are those? How were all these technologies lost?"
"I do not have accurate historical records, but based on my database and overlaying them with information hypothesized or left behind by your society, it appears that the original colonists have been often referenced in myths. Your ancient religions talk about gods descending from the heavens, frequently portrayed riding aboard massive arks, boats and other chariots. There are unexplained phenomena where your so-called ancient civilizations were somehow able to engineer technologies that should have been impossible for them during those times. The records of Gilgamesh and ancient Babylon, or the age of Gods."
I listened, too stunned to muster a counterargument. Aegis didn't seem to care and continued with her explanation.
"You also have myths regarding apocalyptic cataclysms where entire civilizations were wiped out. The plagues and floods in the Bible. Mysterious disappearances of entire societies overnight, such as the sinking of Atlantis. The end of gods, or what most of you erroneously term 'Ragnarök' in Norse mythology. These aren't coincidental world-ending disasters, but historical representations of catastrophes that descended upon your world, much like Carmarthen here. An alien invasion from the heavens, with technologies that appear godlike, clashing against equally powerful colonists and resulting in mutual annihilation not just once but several times. Consequently, your technological level has been reset to primitive standards, and the survivors, unable to revive or use such technologies, write them off as magic while leaving them buried in the sands. Like the ruin in the Gobi Desert. Or they believe that such advanced technology was what called upon the apocalyptic attentions of those invading alien races in the first place and thus forbade them, sealing them in underground tombs or destroying them so that they can escape the notice of such wrathful 'gods' or even 'demons.'"
I held my head and sighed. This was just too much to take. This sounded just like a fanciful tale from a science fiction story.
"Whatever. There's no point thinking too much about this." Whatever might have transpired in the distant past, it had no bearing on my plans for the future. Humanity was on track to develop space traveling technology, and already the Saurians' attention had been drawn to us for whatever reason. I wasn't going to let the aliens bully us without a fight, and the best chance I had of protecting my home world was to gather all these relics, muster a fleet and repel whatever invaders intent on trespassing into the solar system. Glancing at my borrowed sword and gun, I hardened my resolve. "I should get some rest and prepare for the battle tomorrow. All this thinking and worrying over history and whatever can wait until we recover the relic in this world and return home safely after that."