Translator: TheWhiteBook
Proofreader/editor: Estee & Piper
Your Majesty The Merfolk, Hello (8)
Wake’s fingers stiffened, and his ear fins moved, and he looked to his side.
His deep eyes were frighteningly profound.
Like the abyss of the sea, there was a horrifying sense that a person could be swallowed up.
Bai Weiwei seemed to not see the murderous look in his eyes as she reached out to change the water for him.
“You belong in the ocean, and when I first saw you after you were born, I wanted you to return.”
Wake’s smile was cold and thick with ridicule.
He tossed aside the fish. He stretched out his waist lazily and raised his slender neck, but his lashes were drooping, hiding his eyes that were laden with chilling killing intent.
Humans that tried to talk to him were nothing more than prey.
It was simple and easy for him to kill this woman.
After brainwashing him, they would let him go back to the sea.
Then he would order his people to surrender.
Finally the humans would be completely victorious, and all the merfolks would become human slaves or pets.
Wake slowly stretched out his fingers and suddenly opened his mouth to sing.
The song was ethereal and mysterious as it echoed in the air.
Brimming with unknown and dangerous temptations.
Within the temptation was a strong machination to kill.
Bai Weiwei stared at him blankly. Her hearing was blocked, completely unable to hear him sing whether it was Tante1 or Xiangshui Youdu2.
Wake looked at her strangely, this was a song of the merfolk.
Humans simply couldn’t resist.
Yet, she didn’t feel anything.
Wake impatiently ripped off his handcuffs, and tried to reach out to pierce her heart.
Bai Weiwei suddenly said: “I can get you back to the sea. If I die, you will only stay trapped on land.”
The sea, a place all merfolk were called to.
Not to mention the merfolk king.
Wake’s movements paused, he repeatedly hesitated before he stopped trying to kill her.
He opened his thin lips, but he couldn’t speak the human language.
Bai Weiwei: “Are you trying to ask, what am I doing this for?”
Wake leaned against the bathtub.
The water spread over his waist and tail, as he nodded gracefully.
Bai Weiwei’s eyes softened, “Because you’re my child.”
Wake: “……”
Bai Weiwei: “Did you know? I grew up loving merfolks, I even thought it was a mistake that I was born human and not merfolk.”
Wake gave her a faint glance, humphed coldly, and muttered a few words in merfolk.
The system immediately translated: “He said you are ugly, and have no qualification to become a merfolk. You will pull down the value of the entire oceanic merfolk race.”
Bai Weiwei: “Aren’t you unable to translate?”
System: “……”
Bai Weiwei smiled beautifully, completely concealing the mmp mood in her heart.
“My dream is to see merfolks, touch merfolks, and protect them.”
Wake stared at her sidelong. He examined her indifferently with his ice blue eyes.
Scrutinized by the king of the deep sea.
There was enormous pressure.
Bai Weiwei was most accustomed to this kind of pressure. After all, from a young age she was a beauty and wherever she went her body glowed.
She was used to being ogled, so she wasn’t afraid of anyone’s gaze.
Her smile faded, “Humans have been slaughtering merfolks, the pollution of the oceans is getting worse, and every time I see how many merfolks have died in the news, I think humans are really demons.”
Wake didn’t say a word, as he idly supported his cheek with his arm.
He looked at Bai Weiwei indolently and nobly.
He appeared to be waiting for her to finish before he killed her.
Bai Weiwei didn’t seem to sense his murderous feelings at all, she naturally tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear.
Her sober, neat, and beautiful face was stretched tight.
1: 忐忑, seems to be a song, you can copy it into youtube to hear it, there seems to be quite a few covers.↩
2: 香水有毒, also a song. It’s music video was my first result.↩
Look at Bai Weiwei, just selling out all of humanity for some cheap favorability.
I gotta balance this anti-human propaganda out with classic a humanity fuck yeah post.
About twelve years ago, a man died in high orbit over Tau Ceti V.
His name was Drake McDougal, and aside from a few snapshots and vague anecdotes from his drinking buddies, that’s probably all we’ll ever know about him. Another colony-born man with little records and little documentation, working whatever asteroid field the Dracs deigned to allow them. Every now and then a Drac gunship would strut on through the system, Pax Draconia and all that. But that was it.
One fine day, one of those gunships had a misjump. A bad one. It arrived only ninety clicks above atmo, with all of its impellers blown out by the gravatic feedback of Tau Ceti V’s gravity well. The Dracs scraped enough power together for a good system-wide broadbeam and were already beginning the Death Chant when they hit atmo.
People laughed at the recording of sixty Dracs going from mysterious chanting to “what-the-fuck’ing” for years, long after they forgot the name Drake McDougal. The deafening “CLANG” and split second of stunned silence afterwards never failed to entertain. Drake had performed a hasty re-entry seconds after the gunship and partially slagged his heatshield diving after it. Experts later calculated he suffered 11Gs when he leaned on the retro to match velocities with the Dracs long enough to engage the mag-grapples on his little mining tug.
Even the massively overpowered drive of a tug has its limits, and Drake’s little ship hit hers about one and half minutes later. Pushed too far, the tug’s fusion plant lost containment just as he finished slingshotting the gunship into low orbit. (It was unharmed, of course; the Drac opinion of fusion power best translated as “quaint,” kind of how we view butter churns.)
It was on the local news within hours, on newsnets across human space within days. It was discussed, memorialized, marveled upon, chewed over by daytime talk-show hosts, and I think somebody even bought a plaque or some shit like that. Then there was a freighter accident, and a mass-shooting on Orbital 5, and of course, the first Vandal attacks in the periphery.
The galaxy moved on.
Twelve years is a long time, especially during war, so twelve years later, as the Vandal’s main fleet was jumping in near Jupiter and we were strapping into the crash couches of what we enthusiastically called “warships,” I guaran-fucking-tee you not one man in the entire Defense Force could remember who Drake McDougal was.
Well, the Dracs sure as hell did.
Dracs do not fuck around. Dozens of two-kilometer long Drac supercaps jumped in barely 90K klicks away, and then we just stood around staring at our displays like the slack-jawed apes we were as we watched what a real can of galactic whoop-ass looked like. You could actually see the atmosphere of Jupiter roil occasionally when a Vandal ship happened to cross between it and the Drac fleet. There’s still lightning storms on Jupiter now; something about residual heavy ions and massive static charges or something.
Fifty-eight hours later, with every Vandal ship reduced to slagged debris and nine wounded Drac ships spinning about as they vented atmosphere, they started with the broad-band chanting again. And the the communique that confused the hell out of us all.
“Do you hold our debt fulfilled?”
After the sixth or seventh comms officer told them “we don’t know what the hell you’re talking about” as politely as possible, the Drac fleet commander got on the horn and asked to speak to a human Admiral in roughly the same tone as a telemarketer telling a kid to give the phone to Daddy. When the Admiral didn’t know either, the Drac when silent for a minute, and when he came back on his translator was using much smaller words, and talking slower.
“Is our blood debt to Drake McDougal’s clan now satisfied?”
The Admiral said “Who?”
What the Drac commander said next would’ve caused a major diplomatic incident had he remembered to revert to the more complex translation protocols. He thought the Admiral must be an idiot, a coward, or both. Eventually the diplomats were called out, and we were asked why the human race had largely forgotten the sacrifice of Drake McDougal.
Humans, we explained, sacrifice themselves all the time.
We trotted out every news clip from the space-wide Nets from the last twelve years. Some freighter cook that fell on a grenade during a pirate raid on Outreach. A ship engineer who locked himself into the reactor room and kept containment until the crew evacuated. A firefighter who died shielding a child from falling debris with his body, during an earthquake. Stuff like that.
The Dracs were utterly stunned. Their diplomats wandered out of the conference room in a daze. We’d just told them that the rarest, most selfless and honorable of acts – acts that incurred generations-long blood-debts and moved entire fleets – was so routine for our species that they were bumped off the news by the latest celebrity scandal.
Everything changed for humanity after that. And it was all thanks to a single tug pilot who taught the galaxy what truly defines Man.
OMG I love your story 🤯😍 The style reminds me of some of my favorite sci-fi authors ♥️ Do you have more 🤤?
Not really my story, it was posted to /tg/ ~10 years ago, but yeah, there was a follow up from the xeno perspective.
Senator Cooper, Honor and Order on your house,
You asked me, in our last discussion, what it was like to be the one responsible for bringing Humanity into the Hierarchy, the one chosen to pay our blood debt to Drake McDougal’s bloodkin and kind. At the time, I could not answer you properly, today, I intend to do so. First, before I explain further, I wish to impress onto you something we have spoken about before, that my kind, the species you know as the Drac, consider “altruism” to be one of the most alien, and fascinating, of concepts. Until we brought Humanity into full citizenship with the Hierarchy, we did not have a word for it, the closest word to it is not translatable into your language, and holds more similarity to that of “martyrdom” as I understand the concept.
This rose out of what it is to be Drac. Each of us, each and every one of us, sees ourselves, and those directly related to us, as more important than all else. It is instinctual, and a distrust of all those not directly related to us is inherent and nearly overpowering to my kind. It is why we have always distanced ourselves from other species except in the enforcement of the Pax Draconia as Humanity chose to call it (and indeed, the Drac Hierarchy does maintain many similarities with the pre-industrial empire your kind derived the name from). We nearly extinguished ourselves following our own industrial revolution, bloodline turned on bloodline. Further, we used our technology to eradicate every species on the planet that posed even the slightest threat to us. Our xenophobia and clannishness nearly cost our entire world it’s biosphere. When we finally realized what had happened, and that we were facing extinction if we did not change our ways, we established the Hierarchy, and a strict set of castes, duties, and rules of honor.
This, is where Drake McDougal comes into it. He was not conscripted or caste bound to save others or protect them. He sacrificed himself, when it was not his duty, when he had not been asked to do so, with equipment he knew would mean his own death or permanent harm. You must understand, this was practically unprecedented. Only four other times in the history of the Hierarchy following first contact has such a thing occurred. Almost every other species that has evolved has required similarly, brutal or extreme methods as my species’ in order to control these tendencies towards clannism and xenophobia. The Grt’zla have a single hive mind, enforced by non-technological ansible implants, preventing them from seeing one another as separate individuals. The Vandals, less effectively, electronically and chemically subdue their instincts through injects and invasive surgery, controlling themselves through pure logic. Our kind uses a strict moral code and cultural “brainwashing” I think one of your journalists once called it.
Either way, it took us completely by surprise. Drake McDougal paid everything simply to ensure that others lived, gave up his own life for that, without a debt needing to be paid, without a duty to be fulfilled. That this was something “routine” for your species still makes my head ache, and it explains so much at the same time. The Hierarchy, up to that point, saw you as we saw almost every other species that has not fully brought itself under control against these urges. Piracy, smuggling, criminality, intraspecies murder, rape, and anti-social activities. We thought it a wonder, when we made first contact with your kind and brought you into the Pax, that you had not driven yourselves to extinction. We only gave you access to our trade and harvesting systems such as Tau Ceti because your technology at the time was frankly laughable. Fusion, please. We were past it by the time we left our solar system, it still boggles the mind how your kind continued to propel ships by fusion rocket and laser light even after unlocking spatial jump technology. We simply brought you in out of tradition, and truthfully, to keep you from accidentally screwing up anything actually important.
Then this happens. An uneducated, undisciplined, APE saved one of ours, and then we never got so much as a single request for recompense for his death from your kind. It was beyond imagining. The Senate was tearing at their mandibles trying to understand why no blood payment had been asked for. It took them three months to come to the conclusion that it had been a proper martyring, and act of pure selflessness. I can tell you, that made waves throughout the Hierarchy. A bunch of apes, little better than animals, completely undisciplined by any genetic or artificial means, and yet they had done something completely selfless. One of my kind MIGHT do such a thing, our code encourages it in fact, but does not demand such rises beyond duty, and to actually do so is rare in the extreme, and all but unheard of towards another species.
Then came the Vandals in their attacks on your system, and still there was debate in the Senate on how to repay the blood debt, something of that much weight had to be carefully considered. The fact that the issue was further muddied by the Internalists claiming that such an undisciplined, and obviously insane, species could not have understood what they had done, and that Drake McDougal had as likely done it out of some kind of mad fit of whim rather than actual martyrdom was still part on the table. It was not until the Vandals, in their decision to eradicate and enslave your kind for some imagined slight, entered your home world and captured three planets worth of orbital facilities that the Senate finally came to the decision that it was better to be safe than sorry.
I was chosen, a young fleet commander, to be given the honor of repaying our blood debt. I still remember going over the vids of Drake McDougal’s sacrifice again and again, the images playing holographically in every chamber and room of the fleet as we prepared to launch, singing our war hymns in preparation for battle. Then we made the Jump, and that massive, red gas giant, Jupiter, covered the stars, and your pathetic little fleet stood against the war vessels of the Vandals. We opened fire immediately, there was to be no quarter asked for given. The Plutonium-Ion beams our ships were armed with did their terrible work, obliterating their fleet.
There was never any question of who the victor would be, it was simply a matter of time. After all, we were not just repaying the debt, but protecting those who we owed the debt to, we might have been able to end the battle in half as much that span of time if we had not be redirecting our fire to lance down their projectiles before they struck your ships. Though, even knowing your kind better now, no, especially knowing your kind better now, I am just grateful you didn’t jump into the fray beyond laying down your own long range bombardment, that would have made things… much more difficult.
When it ended, I had expected this to be routine. They’d know who I was talking about, surely this Drake McDougal was famous throughout their space, someone as selfless as he was. And then your communications officers didn’t know.
I thought to myself: “Of course, such a horribly disorganized species, they probably haven’t heard, even now, they’re just Apes, do not grow angry, do not insult them for insulting the memory of Drake. Just ask for their commanding officer, surely, HE must know.”
That was when your Admiral Tiberius spoke to me, and once again he didn’t know. I couldn’t comprehend what was being told to me, surely, it must just be a problem with translation, yes. Translation. That would explain it. I told the Translator to explain it fully, slowly, as he would to a hatchling. And then that one word.
“Who?”
That one word sent me over the edge. I thank the stars above that the translator system had been turned off, I was ready to demand that the fleet open fire on them, my officers might even have obeyed if they have been less level headed. “Surely” I thought, “This admiral is an idiot, or a monster. He either is so uninformed that he has never heard of the great hero Drake McDougal, or he is vile, and trying to deny that the sacrifice had ever been made.” That there could be any race so debase and chaotic as deny such heroism made my stomach roil, and it was only the intervention of my second in command that prevented me from turning our Pu.Ion projectors upon the human’s flag ship and purging it.
I sat through the entire diplomatic meeting, through all the news stories. Awestruck. There was no way what I was watching was possible, it simply couldn’t be. They must be fabrications, or possibly all condensed from centuries upon centuries and centuries of selfless acts. If we went through my species entire history, we MIGHT be able to turn up as many as your species has routinely carried out, with barely a fifth of our population, over a period of 10 Sol-3 revolutions. It was mind boggling. The senate was sent into absolute chaos over it. It was inconceivable that a species without some form of strict organization could do such maddening things so routinely that it simply did not register as important enough to make them major historical figures. Our only choice of action was obvious.
Humanity was made full members of the Hierarchy, we had to learn, perhaps glean some secret of your psychology we could apply to our own. We opened our libraries and our sciences to your species, and even then you astounded us with how you took only basic principles, and worked to master them, rather than taking our entire designs. That was nearly 70 Sol-3 revolutions ago, and still shakes me to my core that your kind do not consider this attribute at all special in your own kind, and are so confused when it is not displayed in others.
That, Senator Cooper, is what it was like to be the one responsible for bringing Humanity into the Hierarchy, and allowing one such as yourself to join the Senate, and that is how I have felt ever since that day, and all because of one, single asteroid miner in a tug-craft, doing something that, to him, was nothing special, and I am convinced, he would never have asked for more than a verbal thank you, if the thought of being thanked had even entered his head.
May All Your Debts Be Paid,
High Admiral [Untranslatable into Terran Symbology] of the Hierarchy.
I’m loving this story (maybe cuz I especially love dangerous merfolk instead of those Hans Christian sissies… the ocean is beautiful but ohhh sooo dangerous amiright?)
Thanks for the chapter 🧜🏻♂️