The Speghti are an amphibious reptilian race native to Tra Sakinig, with six limbs, two fore and four rear. They are a very pragmatic people, but like to come up with their own solutions as a community, following their own values, rather than just taking whatever the humans hand them. They live in great fortresses of living coral below and along the coasts, having been pushed back into the sea by the Cay-Opu, and were the long-standing allies of the human colonists of the Outposts. Their culture (Houses, titles, fortresses, the Shock Cavalry and the like) has its own page: Speghti culture.

Anatomy

• Senses: not recorded. Their expressions are noticeably different from human ones, enough that humans are unlikely to read their reactions without practice.
• Breathing: amphibious, able to breathe and live both underwater and on land. They can live in atmosphere for long periods (Tui serves aboard the fleet), although they will choose underwater living spaces when they can get them.
• Locomotion: six limbs, two fore and four rear. Normally they move on the four rear limbs, leaving the forelimbs free for manipulation, but they can drop onto all six to move rapidly when required (somewhere between crocodile-like and centaur-like movement). They are strong swimmers, and flexible enough that one fitted down a ventilation duct the humans could not.
• Scale and dimorphism: not recorded.

Form

How long they live and how they breed are not recorded. What is known is that they are fully at home in the water and can survive on land, and that MES (the metadimensional sensitivity that lets someone be a psychic) is excessively rare among them. The Speghti only know to recognise it because of the Outpost humans; before that, the few who had it once in a generation or two would most likely just die of it.

Habitat

Tra Sakinig is a warm, wet jungle and swamp world full of aggressive flora and fauna. The Speghti evolved there and were there before anyone else. They once held land settlements as well, but the war with the Cay-Opu drove them mostly back into the sea, where they now live in undersea and coastal fortresses. They ceded their forward land settlements to the human colonists (Tralin Outpost still runs on an old Speghti reactor taken over at the time).

They are in general really good at taming and domesticating the fauna they live around, and have done so with many a very large and dangerous predator near their settlements. Granted, they killed a lot and got killed a lot before they figured out how each species should be handled.

Cognition

Pragmatic first and foremost. They will happily take help, but resist wholesale change and prefer their own unique solutions to problems, which has meant that they modernise far too slowly to keep pace with the Cay-Opu, who just copy and steal from humans. Attempts to impose human solutions get refused; help with their own goals gets gratitude.

Their language is Iuil, the Speghti lingua franca (much like Mandate is for humans). It is mostly made of i, u and o vowels with s and l consonants, and has a major pitch component that modifies meaning, so even Speghti speaking Mandate tend to give words a weird inflection. Learning Iuil takes at least a month normally, or a week with Diplomat-1. Most Speghti need a translator torc (Mandate–Iuil) to talk with humans; only the high-ranking or the curious tend to learn Mandate (Tui, for one, deliberately let people think her Mandate was worse than it was).

Works

Most Speghti technology is organic, and TL2/3 does not make it automatically inferior. They grow rather than build:

• Fortresses of living Ichuoi coral, whose outer walls work as water filters feeding phytoplankton to the livestock kept inside; guest quarters are moonpools (air-filled rooms entered through a pool in the floor).
• Biological computers, grown mostly from parts of the Ichinoi, equivalent to a TL3 desktop but the size of a wall; programming them is more teaching than writing code. They are not sentient.
• Coral radio transceivers, the only native long-range communications, big bulky things until the fleet's visit to Fortress Trulia produced backpack-sized prototypes and a standard Speghti-only protocol (it will not mesh with human protocols without a Program check to build an interface).
• Ichuoi coral gene-modified with Outpost help to produce hardened materials, and bioengineered flotation grown for the sea-launch barges at Tralin.
• Starship-class mechs: TL3 experimental heavy mechs, underwater only, six-limbed, built to destroy Cay-Opu ships and submarines. Main record: Starship (Trulianui mech).
• Weapons including the Aquatic Rotary Rifle (chemically propelled hardened pearls), harpoon guns, and the coiled-spring lances and heavy torpedoes developed with the fleet.

The limited gengineering they use was learnt from the humans, mixed with selective breeding.

History

The Speghti evolved naturally on Tra Sakinig and were there before both the Mandate-era human settlers and the Cay-Opu. Their myths, drawn from prehistoric drawings and carvings, tell of oversized creatures arriving with the early humans, at the same time as the Cay-Opu started showing up.

About a century before the fleet arrived, the humans and the Cay-Opu went to war over land. The Speghti were a peaceful people, but sided with the humans because they felt it was in the best interests of the planet's future, and the Cay-Opu drove them back to their undersea strongholds.

The fleet's dealings with them, from first hearing of them during the Wildfire Rescue to the votes on Speghti colonies on Calypso, are on the timeline. Those colonies were offered Autonomous Territory status under Atlas, with self-government and their own technological base, so long as they made no laws infringing the rights of the Atlas Constitution and asked permission before founding or expanding a colony. It was rejected 3–2 at first and later passed narrowly. When the kaiju were released across Tra Sakinig after 9/13/3200 they hit the sea as well, and few Speghti would leave their fortresses. Tui was to return home on 11/11/3201 to organise the first colonists and supplies for Calypso (provisional, under the Sulura continuation).

Epilogue (provisional)

Under the Reshanna occupation of Ragnhil the Speghti are left alone, so long as they keep no starfaring vessels. The swimming kaiju kill a great many Speghti and destroy at least one city-sized fortress, but the organo-mechs first tested at Fort Trulia, and the Speghti skill at pacifying sea creatures, turn some of the kaiju into defenders of the oceans. Over the centuries they catch up with humanity, and in places surpass it, though they remain planet-bound. Tui remains the only Speghti ever to leave Ragnhil.