Ancestor Collection

Adian Stammler, Lt.Cmdr. and Rachel Wraith, Mjr. walked in as invited by their Terran Meritocracy counterparts.
"Welcome, guests, fellow terrans."
"Thank you for your welcome, I have seen Terra, have you?"
"What, no, no one from our civilisation has made the trip back, not since it exists, we hear it's... dangerous for us there."
"What's that? I saw something glinting... Gahh!"
"I'm sorry, what distresses you, that shape... what are those, skulls?"
"Those are fossilized human remains, some of the aliens in this sector can cause this to happen to a living person."
"And you keep all those thus afflicted?"
"No, those are particularly honoured in our culture, all those skulls are gene-lineage starters, very honoured to us."
"And these supports?"
"Are the marks of military units formed from the genes of such individuals."
"Triangle, squares, pentagons, hexagons, heptagons, octogons, nonagons, decagons, enneagons, dodecagons, circles?"
"Units, from squads, onwards in increasing unit sizes, to army corps."
"You have entire army corps gene-sourced from a single person?"
"Yes, but please, don't say gene-sourced, we eschew that term."
"What term do you use?"
"We say the clones are gene-siblings, usually gene-brothers or gene-sisters, but that depends on the individuals cloned. Some where cloned as neithers, and we respect that choice." Her tone of voice seemed to indicate the only respect due to the dead was respect to that choice, and that... problematic was a good indication of her relationship to those clone-sources.
"So, you face enemies that can turn you to stone, and you're not afraid?"
"I have no where to run, being afraid will do me no good."
Adam felt this conversation went nowhere useful and decided to change the subject. "Still, whole army corps of your children?"
"Yes, we have so many. It's common for us to batch them like thus. And we consider them clone-siblings, not clone-children."
Adam knew then, she was lying, oh, they had whole corps made, but it wasn't that easy, nor common, not unless they'd discovered unlimited food while he wasn't looking.
"And not all the skulls are not completely fossilized, is anything known about the process?"
"From what we can tell, the weapons can completely fossilize flesh, but the monsters who do this only care if we're alive or dead, they stop once the target is no longer living, usually. In extremely rare cases, they've completed fossilization of a particular corpse after a battle, but it's not followed any rhyme nor reason we can determine."