What follows their moment at the Memorial Wall is a lot of logistics and management. Rather boring stuff, despite its importance.
So for a brief moment we'll digress to an important part of humankind's history in space that will be of greater importance later in this story.
The first alien race humans met were the Alari. A spacefaring race for thousands of years, they'd long forgotten their own home planet and couldn't comprehend humankind's attachment to theirs. Long limbed and pale as ghosts, they spent their lives on giant ship-cities far from natural light, that still dwarfed anything built in the Milky Way. Their almost translucent skin and colorless hair and eyes had led them to develop an incredibly colorful society favoring flowing robes and headdresses that seemed out of place in the militaristic simplicity of humanity's first few generations of space explorers.
Then they'd met the Valerii, who weren't an alien race by the exact definition, but smaller groups of other alien races that had chosen to band together as wanderers in the blackest part of space.
Finley always thought of them as pirates when she read about them. They had a surprisingly bloodless history with humankind.
Thus far.
The Valerii were most famously quoted among humans for their inability to comprehend humanity's attachment to the ground, despite its obsessive drive to reach every star. "No idea which direction you're going'!" Which was much more eloquent in their native language, naturally, but translated horribly word for word.
The Valerii had remained one the sidelines of the brief war between the Alari and humankind, but neither they nor the Alari had expected the far inferior human race to put up much of fight.
They'd been vastly overconfident and completely unprepared for the level of desperation they'd faced.
The Alari had more advanced technology and knowledge, but the humans they'd faced had been defiant risk-takers who'd ignored any rule or common sense and done whatever was necessary to win. Their tactics had shocked the 'Enlighted' Alari and the wilder Valerii and gone willingly to the negotiation table after only a year of fighting.
It was one of the shortest wars in human history and it had resulted in one of the most fruitful friendships either race had ever seen.
What had followed had been a period of blissful exploration, with the human race venturing further and further beyond the Milky Way. It's odd to read about those times now, when they've so desperate to isolate themselves from it all for all of Finley's life.
She's only heard stories of the race that drove humans back to the Milky Way and then the Solar System where they'd originated.
They didn't have a name. Not a proper one anyway. The Alari and the Valerii and many other races humans had met during their exploration had tales of them. A plague like race that appeared and disappeared like storms of locusts. The closest anyone could get to something humans could understand was a parasite. An insect-like race that shared a hive mind and looked like a cross between a cockroach and a fly. The largest ever recorded was only the size of a human hand, but they built huge living ships that reminded Finley of a yellow jacket nest, and they never stopped growing unless they were completely destroyed.
They only boasted minimal, unrefined weapons and at first, it had seemed like an easy victory. Humankind's first records were filled with confusion about why the Alari were so desperate for an alliance to find them.
Then, at the Battle of Four Stars, a hive ship had purposely crashed into an Alari ship and immediately begun enveloping it like honey. The Alari only managed to evacuate a fraction of the ship's occupants before it had been completely taken over. Anyone infected, they explained as they asked Captain Brenton Teller the most famous human captain of that war, to destroy the ship, was beyond saving. The parasites burrowed into the nervous system and the brain, fed on the internal organs, taking over the body and controlling it until there was nothing left to eat inside and then they laid eggs in the carcass.
They burrowed inside the forms of other races and used them until there was nothing left. They had no society, no art, no greed, no purpose beyond reproduction and infestation.
People back home in the Milky Way hadn't believed the stories until an enterprising team of spies managed to sneak aboard a hive and record what they saw.
The horrifying event had turned out one rather major silver lining. Two of the team were infected on camera, but unlike the Alari and other races that fell under the parasites control in a matter of minutes, both had made it into medical care where the parasites were extracted surgically with only minor, temporary paralysis to both.
To the horror of the Alar, the event led to what would have been considered questionable testing in any era and was carefully noted to have been completely voluntary in any of the new history books.
…..
Human resistance to the parasite had was tested by deliberate infection, pain, medication, diet, environment, any imaginable that would affect the human body's ability to fight off an invader. They discovered that while immense pain and severe physical weakness did give the parasite a better advantage, the natural makeup of the human body was the main reason the parasite could not take more than temporary control and inevitably died 24-36 hours later. The unique mineral make-up of Earth that had led to the very birth of the human race, had also given them a body composition that the parasite couldn't thrive in.
With their resistance assured, humankind turned its attention to finding the most effective way to kill the parasites.
They called it Dante's Inferno.
Because again, soldiers are just that creative.
~ tbc