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The sky again flashed twice, orange to mauve to pink, before flickering and fading into a deep, cool blue. Their sun, for eons little more than a bright spot in the solid field of red, shone harshly bright, blue-white against the white stone and plasticrete that made up the steps of the Grand Unified Parliament Building of Fazzal.
"Is that - ?" one of the younger MPs asked, one thin appendage stretching upward to point at the naked sky.
The Secondary Minister wriggled his ears in the affirmative. "Look in the old film scrolls. That's what it looked like - before."
"Yes," murmured one of the older female MPs who had joined them on the stairs. "The Ancestors remember. The colors will be right, now, outdoors as they are inside." She swallowed, her third eye darting as it saw a place and time that was not here and now. "We will see night again, rightly. We shall see stars."
"I am sure the Ancestors will have much to remind us that we have forgotten," the Secondary Minister added, soothingly. The shamans always made him just a little nervous. Has the shield finally failed? he wondered, before turning and loping upwards to the top of the steps, to the public information terminal next to the security station.
He jammed his personal identistick into the slot, followed by the Prime Minister's identicode. Her face instantly filled the screen, three eyes focused on the camera. "We have a situation - " he began, and was cut off. "Of planetary significance, I know. Unfortunately, the MP from Golbalatz doesn't believe me or the alarm. I'll be there as soon as I can, and I delegate the authority to you to deal with the situation until I arrive, Authorization Code 11909." Her voice dropped slightly. "Good luck. Let's hope they haven't returned to finish what they started."
"Prime Mover, I hope not." The Secondary Minister shuddered. The console beeped; he touched a switch, and the Prime Minister's visage was replaced with -
"Starbase? Is that you?" The starbase, an ancient construction that had been there as long as the slave-shield had, had stopped transmitting thirty spins of Fazzal around their sun ago, after three consecutive automated resupply ships from the Ur-Quan had failed to arrive. The old transmissions had been data- and audio-only, though - the Ur-Quan had not trusted them enough to allow them to send video signals to the planet, only to their ships. Or perhaps video simply couldn't penetrate the shield, even if they'd been willing to permit it; at this remove, it was somewhat unclear.
The equipment in the background of the transmission looked as if it had been disassembled and thoroughly cannibalized for parts.
"It's us! At least, the survivors." The elderly, emaciated Faz in the screen coughed against her primary manipulator. "Acting Starbase Commander Zillah nu-Dabi ni-GrobNavy here. We'd assumed the Ur-Quan had abandoned us to die - we've been trying to keep the life-support systems working at the expense of everything else. The previous Commander, Tulluk, is dead, as are about two-thirds of the base complement. We - um - we had to return the bodies to the refabber. Disease risk, and we, uh, we couldn't waste the base elements by giving them a space burial. We hope their next-of-kin will understand."
Returning them to the refabber would have meant their masses' worth of food that the fabber could provide the survivors. It wasn't cannibalism, exactly, but it was close enough to make the Secondary Minister shudder. "Understood. We will pass that information along. This is Secondary Minister Gibbel nu-Zaddah ni-FalFazzal here. The Prime Minister will be here as soon as she can. Starbase, the shield has fallen! Can you give us any information?"
"Sure can, Secondary Minister Gibbel. Take a look at this." She flipped a switch in front of her, out of sight of the camera, and the image changed to an outside view of the starbase. A huge ship filled the screen, a vast disk with corrugations and tiers, bristling with protrusions that might have been sensors or weapons. Or possibly both, since the ship was -
"The Ancient Ones," Gibbel breathed in awe.
"Not quite," came Commander Zillah's voice again. "The ship is of Ancient One design, but it's actually of relatively recent construction. Another race discovered a buried Ancient One factory, and thank all the Ancestors and the Prime Mover Itself that the Ur-Quan didn't realize what they'd found when they captured it. Shall I let you talk to the captain, or do we want to wait for the Prime Minister?"
"No waiting required," said her voice behind Gibbel's shoulder. "I showed him the sky through the window and he ran out of the building." She turned to address the screen. "Prime Minister Idigga nu-Kabral ni-FalFazzal here. Whom am I addressing, and what am I seeing?"
"Acting Starbase Commander Zillah nu-Dabi ni-GrobNavy here, and you're looking at the ship that took down the shield. Well, technically, the flagship of the small fleet that took down the shield."
"Are they friendly?" the Prime Minister asked, getting right to the most important point as usual.
"Well, their first action on getting here was to give us a shipment of radioactives to get our fusion generators back on-line, no payment required, no questions asked," the Commander answered. "Then they asked us if we thought you would want the shield down. Can you imagine, they asked us? We all just about fell on the floor at the suggestion it could be done! When they finally figured out that that meant 'yes,' they spread out and found all the cloaked shield generators, and deactivated them in sequence, all around the globe in a pattern. Now the captain of the flagship wants to talk to you, PM."
"Do we want to take this privately?" Idigga whispered to Gibbel.
"Not a chance," he whispered back. "If we do, there'll be conspiracy theories for millennia."
"Excellent. We're agreed, then," she finished, and then swiped her identistick through the slot. "Override: Prime Minister speaking, voiceprint."
"Positive identification," the terminal said in its mechanically flat voice.
"Open this conversation to any interested media channel; broadcast on the PlanetNet open access and record there as well as to the Parliamentary databank."
"Broadcasting. Recording. Invitation sent," the terminal replied.
The Prime Minister straightened the fur at her head and shoulders. "Now let's find out what they want."
"Switching you over now; they're standing by," announced the Starbase Commander. "Good luck!"
The image switched from the ship's exterior to its interior. In the central seat was a mostly-hairless biped in a simple uniform, off-white with red trim. To his left was a similar biped, a bit taller, but her skin was blue and her uniform, though in the same colors as his, was clearly cut to show off her secondary sexual features, and displayed her midriff and arms; her skin was a vivid blue, contrasting with his dull pink. To his right was a pillar of clear crystal banded in bright metal, spaced with what looked like sensors. Behind them were a couple more members of the commanding officer's race, a one-eyed green being with a stiff neck and a head ringed with small tentacles, three small fungoid-looking creatures on a hover-platform, another biped in an ornate mask, two birdlike bipeds (one tall without feathers, wearing only a crisscross piece of what looked like leather armor and a brief red kilt; one shorter and feathered, in an open-sided white robe with red trim and a green sash), a pair of furred bipeds with dark eyes and shiny noses, and over at the edges of the screen -
A Mael-Num. And a green Ur-Quan.
Gibbel flinched; Idigga hissed. Then they caught themselves; this was not the appropriate time for instinctive emotional reactions. Gibbel wobbled his head to clear it. "Prime Minister Idigga nu-Kabral ni-FalFazzal and Secondary Minister Gibbel nu-Zaddah ni-FalFazzal of the Grand Unified Parliament of Fazzal, here," he said, his voice shaking only slightly as he gestured at each of them in turn. "May we have the pleasure of knowing who we address?"
"I'm Admiral Zelnick of the New Alliance of Free Stars," the biped in the commander's chair said, showing his teeth - front, not back, and in a mammal that meant they weren't aggressive, right? "We took the liberty of removing your Ur-Quan slave shield after conferring with your starbase personnel, who, by the way, if you have any operating shuttles after all this time, you should probably come and get them - they're not in great shape up here."
"I'm afraid we don't," the Prime Minister said, lowering her ears. "None of our ships are capable of out-of-atmosphere flight. It - hasn't been necessary in a very, very long time."
"I figured." The Admiral turned to the blue-skinned biped and asked something that the microphone didn't pick up; she nodded. He turned back to the camera. "If you'd like, we can send one of our shuttles over for them and bring them back to our ship for the moment."
"You can't send them down here?" The Secondary Minister was suspicious; he hoped it hadn't spilled over too much into his words, or at least into how the translator was rendering them.
"Well, we were hoping you'd let us land the flagship so we could talk to you directly," the Admiral explained.
The Prime Minister shook her head. "Impossible. First of all, that's a warship; we'd be fools to allow you to come within your weapons range of our planetary defenses. Secondly, and more importantly, we don't currently have an operating spaceport; we repurposed all of ours as airports, at least the ones that survived the Ur-Quan barrage. There's nowhere we could safely land you. And that leads me to the third point: that," she said in her best leader-of-the-planet voice, pointing at where the Ur-Quan would be displayed on their viewer, "is not welcome on our homeworld. Not now, not ever."
"I warned you that this might occur," grated the Ur-Quan from its perch at the side of the bridge.
"I can't say we're exactly thrilled to see the Mael-Num, either," admitted the Secondary Minister.
The orange blobby creature made a small shuffling bow. "We are the Melnorme, now. It is to be hoped that we have grown out of our old cowardice, but, truly, if we had stood beside you, would the outcome have been any different?"
Gibbel rubbed below his ear with one manipulator. "Very likely not."
The Mael-Num - sorry, Melnorme - glanced across the bridge. "Although, that is a good question, one that hadn't even occurred to us to ask. Three hundred credits - what did you do to Numaal?"
The Ur-Quan swayed slightly on its perch. "I am not sure; I am not a historian. I vaguely recall that we shielded it, so that you would be denied its resources if you chose to return, and so that the Kohr-Ah would not scour it simply because you had lived there once."
The Melnorme turned back to the biped in the captain's chair. "We may have an offer coming the Alliance's way shortly, Admiral."
"I'll be glad to hear it once the current business is concluded," the admiral said, nodding. "Prime Minister Idigga nu-Kabral ni-FalFazzal - "
"Just our titles will be fine, for the purposes of negotiation," the Prime Minister assured him.
"Very well, Prime Minister, if you are uncomfortable with us landing the flagship, I will be happy to turn its command over to Commodore Talana and take one of the smaller ships in the fleet to the surface. I would imagine you have enough space at one of the major airports to land a Blade?" A bar at the bottom of the screen appeared and shaded slowly from red to green, indicating the download of a data package. A secondary window popped up, displaying the size and shape of the ship, long and narrow.
"A Blade? It still sounds like a warship," the Prime Minister said slowly, eyes on the rudimentary blueprint.
"It is, to some extent. But it's too small to do much against planetary defenses, at least as a single ship, and if we choose a smaller one, we won't be able to escort the shuttle down." The Admiral shifted in his chair, as if he were uncomfortable. "I'll be coming along, of course, but the primary diplomats are Captain Grawky Breepy -" he indicated the feathered birdlike biped behind him, who turned up the corners of her beak and waved - "and Commander Txtxnn." A shimmer ran up and down the pillar of crystal as the Admiral gestured at it.
"That thing's sentient?" blurted Gibbel.
"I AM," replied the pillar in a strangely-inflected mechanical voice. It didn't sound offended, exactly, but how would you tell with something like that?
The Prime Minister flicked her ears, once, decisively. "You may land the Blade on the main plaza at Nu-Davan Memorial Airport." She tapped at the touch-pad in front of the screen. "I am uploading the coordinates to you now; I hope our file formats are not an issue."
"The translators should be able to take care of it," the Admiral said, glancing backwards at the green cyclopean, who waved its tentacles in unison at him. Apparently that was an affirmative; the Admiral turned back to the two ministers. "I think we're okay on that front. It'll take us approximately an hour" - the screen displayed an equivalent time in decaclicks along the bottom - "to load up all your starbase personnel, and then another hour to transport the appropriate people and materials to the Blade. Transport to the surface should take maybe ten minutes after that."
The Prime Minister added up all the decaclicks. "Excellent. A Parliamentary delegation will meet you there. Just so I know what kind of meeting to set up, do you wish to address the whole Parliament, or just us, initially, and what is the intended goal of your landing party?"
"The Ancestor-spirits are strong here," murmured the bird-woman. "Admiral, the omens are auspicious for a public address in front of the whole Parliament first, followed by meetings with smaller groups as necessary."
"I CONCUR," said the pillar.
The Admiral nodded. "Okay, big public address first - I'll let you guys do most of the talking, I'll just say who we are and introduce you - then more one-on-one negotiations. As for our purpose here - we'd like to get you to ally with the the New Alliance of Free Stars. To join us, if possible."
"We will never join any alliance that includes the Ur-Quan," the Prime Minister snapped. The fur on her shoulders bristled.
"We have changed," grated the Ur-Quan from the side of the bridge. "We changed previously; ask your Ancestors what we were like - before." It leaned back; a shiny metal translator unit glinted against its neck. "The Dnyarri are gone, forever. Even their degraded forms were too dangerous to keep, in the end. We seek to undo the damage they have done, to the galaxy - and to ourselves."
The pillar shimmered again. "AND IT WOULD BE APPROPRIATE TO RE-UNITE THE FOUR SURVIVING RACES OF THE SENTIENT MILIEU, IF POSSIBLE."
"Four?" The Secondary Minister counted quickly on his manipulators. "Us, the Ur-Quan, the Mael-Num - who else?"
A small green-tinted biped with a head much too large for its slender neck seemed to appear behind the blue-skinned commander; at least, neither Minister had noticed it there before. "We have it on good authority," it said, in a strangely musical voice, "that the Taalo were not completely destroyed. We believe there are survivors, and we are attempting to make contact with them."
"The Taalo," breathed the Prime Minister. "Why, some of the Ancestors still sing of them! But they . . . "
"Old wrongs," grated the Ur-Quan, "cannot be made right again completely. But the attempt must still be made. They can be made - better than they are."
The Prime Minister's ears flicked. "We will meet you at the airport in twenty-two decaclicks. I hope you will have many answers for us then, because the Members of Parliament will certainly have many, many questions."
"We will attempt to answer them as quickly as we can," the Admiral assured her. "To that end, we'll get started up here, beginning with that rescue shuttle. Zelnick out." The screen faded, then returned to the starbase.
"Are they coming to get us?" Apparently the Starbase Commander had been listening in to at least part of the transmission.
"They are. Get your staff ready to come home." The Prime Minister glanced at the backdrop of ruined machinery. "I suspect we'll be decommissioning that thing once you've left."
"On the one hand, she's stuck it out this long - it seems a waste, somehow. On the other hand, I can't wait to see it in the rear viewscreen, so perhaps it's for the best." The commander saluted and the screen dissolved to static.
The Secondary Minister turned to his superior. "This is going to take a lot of explaining."
"As soon as the hoax rumors die off, I think we'll be okay." Idigga's manipulators laced through those of her political spouse. "I hope you got a good night's sleep last night, because I don't think we'll be getting much for the next few days."
Gibbel wriggled his ears emphatically. "As long as we make all the records open to public access, those should die down in a moon-turn or two. Prime Mover, we'll be able to see the moons! I can't imagine what the public's reaction to being invited into an alliance with the Ur-Quan as equals will be, though."
"We'll let the idea percolate and then arrange a full vote. This is too big to be decided by Parliament alone." The Prime Minister glanced around. "We'd better start picking our delegation. Who do we know that's not xenophobic and not too excitable?"
"Well, Dibbik is kind of excitable, but he used to be a scientist; I think he'll approach this from an expansion-of-knowledge perspective. Kuddah is pretty down-to-Fazzal. How about, what's her name, the Minister of Agriculture? This is all going to change her job significantly . . . " They turned and headed back into the halls of Parliament.
The stars would be returning, shortly. Perhaps they would be returning to the stars, soon, as well.