Humanity Endures

Part 4 - The Beginning of the End | Chapter 4

Elthinar's mostly-electronic body pulsed rhythmically, its expansive synthetic vein network dancing to the tune of his artificial heart, which throbbed erratically from within his metallic chest: even he was affected by stress. The utilitarian confines of Elthinar's utterly bland laboratory did little to assuage this concern, his bio-readouts indicated extreme levels of stress hormones, and his heart continued to pound with all the rhythm of a drunk Nahmatiixer playing an instrument — things were not good.

Concerningly, Elthinar's heart was not the most-erratically functioning organ he possessed — that award went safely to his mind. Under orders, Elthinar had been resisting the urge to succumb to endless, unproductive musing on the nature of the alien invasion; instead, he was supposed to spend his time creating a functioning alien detector, or, failing that, observing fragments of shattered alien hulls from recent battles — fragments that were as small as they were radioactive. These were difficult things to attempt indeed: his former alien-detector design had been limited in that the alien flesh it was trained to detect wasn't trying to hide itself, and the aliens had quickly restructured their biology to be even more difficult to uncover with a scanner, mere hours after the scanner had been employed over Light's End. The latter task, analyzing fragments of alien ships, was difficult because there was only so much research — and interest for the researcher — that can be extrapolated from a scrap of hull smaller than one's index finger. As such, when Xertaza had arrived in his chambers, seeking treatment of the most fascinating variety, Elthinar welcomed the opportunity to divert himself to a more interesting task. Once her issue had been treated as best as it could be, and Xertaza had left, Elthinar, his curiosity having become irresistible, secluded himself with his thoughts for the remainder of the galactic day.

Skittering around the perimeter of his utilitarian personal quarters on his spindly, metallic legs, Elthinar's mind wrestled ferociously with seemingly infinite questions, all of them pertaining to the alien menace that assailed the galaxy at present: "If the aliens possess the ability to travel through Light's End with impunity, why then only send such a limited fleet?" he asked himself. "If they can travel classical distances instantly, then why attack through Light's End?" Speculation was unlikely to prove fruitful, and it wasn't as if he could ask the aliens their opinion on the matter, but it made Elthinar feel better to try and answer the impossible questions anyway.

Above all other questions, however, Elthinar inevitably returned to the same question, perhaps the most answerable of the lot, and the one whose answer had the most dire consequences: "What does humanity do if it cannot win the war conventionally?"

Thus far, Elthinar hadn't found an answer, and it didn't look like he would find it soon: it took him another solid, wasted hour, until he decided to give up pointless pondering and turn to more productive pursuits. In this case, 'productive pursuits' meant analyzing charred remnants of the alien fleet that had tried to attack Retharxia, seemingly selected from the least intact, least interesting, and most radioactive pieces of garbage the human fleet could find. Were he more biological, Elthinar may have felt apprehension at the prospect of working with material that had been hit by thousands of nuclear detonations, even with the requisite safety equipment; however, with scarcely five pounds of meat in him, Elthinar was simply concerned with how dull a prospect it was. As whatever samples remained were little more than charred pieces of radioactive metal, there could hardly be any ground-breaking discoveries garnered from them, making them a waste of Elthinar's own scientific brilliance, and his time. The best he could do was to determine the composition of the ships, and some of their basic armor structure, but that had already been done hours ago; the entire galaxy's navy was being adapted to better attack alien ships as he worked on something utterly unimportant.