The Cay-Opu are a furred mammalian race, gorilla-like and slightly larger than a large human. Most have four arms, though a larger and rarer caste has six. Every one of them has MES to some degree and many are unparalleled psychics, which goes back to how they were made. They were for a very long time a race mired in greed and violence, though they have made great strides in other areas despite this, and the violence turned out to be less their own doing than anyone on the planet had thought.

Origin

The Cay-Opu are not native to Tra Sakinig. The Speghti were there first, and the Cay-Opu were made by some of the very first human settlers, the Franklin Bio-industrial team, before the ordinary colonists ever arrived. Gorillas were genetically modified into a labour force that could work for days on end, and were kept under control by the gorilla control unit, a psitech machine under a ziggurat in the jungle, wired through a lunar relay to sites all over the world. Up close it gave them specific orders, mostly to dig. Further out it dulled their reasoning and heightened their aggression. The name comes from the "Cay operators", or from the team's head of zoology, Doctor Kay Oppu, or both. A sign in the mining cavern under the ziggurat still read "The Cay operators are not your friend. Report sentient activity to an overseer."

Speghti oral history remembers the early Cay-Opu as six-limbed and furred, and a Speghti diplomat implied to the fleet that they had been brought by an even earlier group of humans. That turned out to be right.

Body and mind

They are big, hairy and primate-like, with gorilla proportions on the large side of humanoid, and the extra pair of arms makes them expert climbers in the tall trees. The six-armed caste is larger again; under the ziggurat they drove the nuclear-cell dump trucks, and the shaman who led the diggers was one of them, kept alive by a pacemaker.

All of them are touched by MES, which is why so many of their elites are strong psychics, and also why the control unit could reach them at all. The colonists always said they had an eerie way of knowing their orders without being given them.

They speak a bastardised form of Human standard, the Terran Mandate lingua franca, with some Speghti and one or two words of their own mixed in, spoken with a gorilla's tongue. Hardly anyone outside the Cay-Opu speaks it.

The long war

As far as the outposts were concerned, raiding was the whole of Cay-Opu society. They had fought the human colonists in a guerrilla war since the colonists landed (ambushes, traps and hit-and-run raids through the canopy) and drove the Speghti back into the sea. They fight in war-pairs, so kill one and the other hunts you. They learn and manufacture TL3, and sometimes TL4, copies of human weapons, from advanced bows and machetes up to spike throwers and an anti-aircraft gun behind a shield painted "Go bananas", and their elites have turned up in stolen Mandate armour with energy shields. They barter rather than use money. Their demands were the enslavement of the Speghti and the removal of the humans, and blood feuds between bands and outposts could run for decades.

After the machine

On 9/13/3200 a fleet party under the ziggurat killed the shaman and shut the gorilla control unit down for good. The compulsion lifted, and so did whatever had been keeping Franklin's other experiments asleep, so the Tra Sakinig kaiju clawed their way out the same night and fell on the Cay-Opu villages first. Tim Treebreaker, who guided the party out, put it simply: the beasts were destroying what little civilisation his people had been able to cultivate under the oppression of the lunar mining core.

What came out from under the machine was a much less murderous people, and a frightened one. At the Tra Sakinig forum Timothy Treebreaker spoke for them from FOB Yulong, and the fleet resolved to open diplomatic dialogue with the Cay-Opu and help where it could. Byoki's starving band near Yakona Outpost, after a ten-year blood feud with the outpost, agreed to leave for the Cradle. Others joined the fleet outright: two groups of 25 served as marines in the SPU aboard the Dark Grail, in SPU colours, trained by Ulfvar Swordtooth, and Jenny Bertasky commanded a platoon of them and trained the Cay-Opu security forces in discipline and restraint. Some even went to the Academy in the Lair.

Epilogue (provisional)

Under the Reshanna occupation of Ragnhil, the humans and Cay-Opu aboard the Cradle bear the brunt of Reshanna law being enforced in space. Because of the kaiju they are not resettled on Tra Sakinig, but they may integrate as Reshanna over time.