Valt Chronicle: 1-2201-16
Valtup Surrounds the sulfer covered Urakkus like an industrial double halo, on the outside, ancient shipyards lie silent, humming gently in idle work, it's arms and tools awaiting an order to come to life.
On the inner ring, closest to the heat of Urakkusâs surface, is where we, the Valk, were born. The inner ring of Valtup is hot, cramped, and urban, it was not made for luxurious living, it was made for work, pulling magma from the world below and turning it into shiny neo-steel alloy for fleets that once conquered the galaxy.
While our bodies do not need conventional nutrients, absorbing energy through the low background radiation from Urakkus and supplementing by consuming raw ore, There are still those that go hungry.
The forges are quiet. While the magma itself is harvested as pure steel, the raw iron needed for our diets is in short supply, any ore close enough to the surface becomes inedible, fusing with other elements.
This is what has forced us to cull, and unify.
Before the Unification, our people were separated into Battle-Clans, warring over scraps and dwindling resources, the weakest, killed, the strongest tempered by steel and boltgun rounds. Until, Hiishza, the unifier, began his campaign.
He knew our people would only survive unified, as one, under a strong guiding hand. Or not at all. Withering away into starvation as ore became more and more scarce from our reserves. And so his warriors marched.
And each clan fell decisively. Small Clans merged with others, until it was Hiishza's Unification forces, against a united sector of rebels in the Western Shipyards. Logistics Officer Chako, barely more then a hatchling then, was key to breaking thier defensive lines, fine tuning our matter synthesizers to squeeze out every last ounce of resource, until we outgrew them.
We grow larger as we age, never truly stopping, though it is stunted by malnutrition, the rebels stood at 7 foot tall on average, small, for our species.
Once food was taken care of, if only temporarily by the experimental tweaking of our synthesizers. We grew to our average size, 10-11 feet tall, muscle upon muscle. Regaining our healthy color, from white and ashen greys to coming in colors of brown, black, and a faded red.
We are Covered naturally in thick plates of alloyed metal, our gut processing the iron ore much like our own forges, a perfect defense against the scorching heat of the inner ring, and even better against traditional weaponry. And once properly fed, too thick to penetrate with rebel weaponry. A great crest of alloy spikes run down our back, growing larger and thicker with age, thiers woukd chip, and fall off, brittle. Ours were strong, heavy, and perfect as a battering ram.
Three pairs of eyes dawn our reptilian face, two atrophied and small and one of normal comparative size and function, for them, two were blind, and one did not work as well.
Our hands, more shaped like a great grizzly if one had thumbs, are protected from harm by the same alloy plating that dons our back, for the rebels, this was thin or nonexistent, for us, it was thick, and pure.
Even our children, for many years we were hatched detached from our shells, and instead the rock-like egg was used as a first meal. Now, they were born with thier shells properly fused to thier skin, a good foundation for the spikes to grow from.
They were no match, most defected simply to be fed, the hold outs⌠well, that was fewer mouths to feed.
It has been twenty years since Hiishza declared himself âFire Lordâ and the short boon of nutrition born from war is long over, resources now even more scarce. And it has been a year, since he died.
In twenty years, we learned the language from the ancient shipyards computer, and began to pour over the files it gave us. fission power, energy weaponry, chemical thrusters, and⌠the experimental jump drives.
Hiishza spent the last twenty years of his life preparing our world for space travel, however rudimentary, and we built slow, crude satellites to explore our system, his crowning achievement being The Hiishza Memorial Station, of course named after his death. As a Bastion of safety within the system.
It's construction led to the formation of interstellar mining companies, setting out to draw ore from the other, untouched and barren planets within the system, it didn't solve our shortage, but it did buy us a little more time.
And his had run out. Fire Lord Hiishza died from malnutrition and age at the proud age of 65, and on his deathbed, named his successor, Logistics Officer Chako.
Chako took the mantle of Fire Lord on the first cycle of the year 2200 without fanfare, his first speech was not a promise of wealth or power, but a somber memorial of who came before, and an honor of his legacy.
After a week, and no more of mourning. Fire Lord Chako began work on what he always did best, efficiency.
He appointed Zaafgol, a prominent weapons technician he had worked with in the war as his Head of Sciences, and tasked him and his team to decrypt the remaining uncorrupted files on the shipyards computers. And to salvage any technology possible from the data.
This was not a simple or easy task, the computers being so old that any data they contained were peicemeal, incomprehensible, or simply lost to time. And yet⌠some progress was being made. As decryptors and programmers worked together to extract and translate the data.
Meanwhile, the Fire Lord ordered a tax on any unused goods to be broken down into its raw components, and announced subsidies on any mining operations within the system, offering direct, government funded support for the acquisition of raw ore- the result was an explosion of independent mining companies, prospecting the system for every drop of ore it contained.
It did not take long for raw ore to come rolling in again, iron, copper, tin, palladium, cobalt. All of it streaming into The Hiishza Memorial Station at a breakneck pace, the Starport had to expand it's cargo bay before the year 2202
In less then a year, we were eating well again, our population exploding from 3.4 million to 4.5 million before the amount of eggs laid in six months could be counted, civillan model ships became available for purchase, the Valt no longer trapped on the molten ring of thier home but instead free to spread across the entire Satarval System.
The final act of the year was the sending of scouts to the neighboring systems of Baxom, a neutron star that had brightened our sky for thousands of years, and Tyast, searching for a new home to call our ownâŚ
