Not to be taken seriously and this most certainly won’t happen in canon, but I hope it will brighten ten minutes of lockdown.
In fact, ‘Terran soil’ was a misnomer. The official welcoming ceremony was to take place on the Bertrand Russell Platform, a space dock and shipyard in a stable elliptical orbit between Earth and Mars, unofficially but universally known as ‘The Teapot’. Originally created as a waystation and refuelling stop for ships travelling between Earth and Mars, it had become less important as the speed and range of ships had improved. It had been chosen because it was a TCA facility with no settled civilian population, so there was no chance of protests disrupting the ceremony. As agreed, the entire Terran fleet was docked at the station. They were all there, from the Victory, the latest and largest battleship, to the crippled Galvin, the only scout ship to return from humanity’s Alien Contact Mission, her repairs unlikely to ever be completed; what would be the point? Positioned around The Teapot was the Loroi battlegroup that had brought the Governor. Although a tiny part of the Loroi fleet, it outnumbered the entire Terran fleet two to one, and the Victory would have been no match for even its smallest frigate.
Three Terrans were waiting in the cavernous Arrivals Hall to meet their new alien overlords, Commodore Albert Ramsbottom, TCA Officer in charge of The Teapot, Lady Jennifer Ramaswami, Terran Attaché to the Loroi Governor and Admiral Milton Kwadjo Oyobo, Supreme Commander of the Terran Armed Forces; three officials senior enough to not risk giving offence, but pointedly not the leaders of Earth and her colonies. From their position they had a wonderful view through the armourplex ceiling of the Loroi fleet in all its glory hanging in space, and the Terran ships with their skeleton crews riding forlorn and powered down at their moorings. They had a particularly good view of the gigantic Herald class Loroi battleship docked at the station directly in front of them.
“Why are we doing this again?” snorted the Admiral.
“It can’t hurt to show our new overlords due respect,” replied the Attaché. “We can at least give them the courtesy of pretending we’re meeting on equal terms.”
“No-one on either side believes that for a minute. This is no more than abject surrender. If I had my way, we wouldn’t turn up at all.”
“Now, now, plan B, remember? Someone has to do it, and you are the one with all the egg on your collar. I think the fact that it is just the three of us sends the message clear enough.”
“At least I’ve arranged playing a fanfare to welcome them,” said the Commodore.
“What did you choose?” asked the Admiral.
“I was thinking of something positive and defiant, like Rule Britannia, but the bit about never being slaves rang a bit hollow. The Entrance of the Queen of Sheba is always a favourite, but it’s a bit too jolly. Someone suggested the theme music from Galaxy Wars, but that would have been silly. In the end, I settled on a bit of Wagner.”
“Seriously? Wagner goes on forever.”
“Like the man said, Great Moments and Awful Quarter of an Hours. This is one of the Great Moments, from the end of Das Rheingold, when the rainbow bridge forms, and the gods enter Valhalla. Thought it was kind of appropriate. Just a couple of minutes of music while they walk from the airlock to us.”
“Considering what happens at the end of 'Götterdämmerung', let’s hope it’s not that appropriate,” said the Attaché, with wry smile. “Which version did you use? Mars Symphony Orchestra?”
“No, an old 20th century recording. Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. If you ever thought that the phrase ‘I want everything louder than everything else’ was invented by Ritchie Blackmore, you’ve never heard Stokowski doing Wagner. Of course, it’s been ayeyed to get it up to modern standards and we thought it worth getting a decent sound system. At least we can impress them with our audio technology if nothing else.”
“Let’s hope they like it”.
“By all account they’re a bunch of racist militaristic fascists. Wagner will be right up their street.”
“I hear they’re cute and graceful. A bit like cats.”
“They’re also cruel, malicious, selfish, little bastards,” grumbled the Admiral.
“Exactly like cats then.”
The airlocks at the far end of the hall opened. The Loroi had provided little information about the composition of their delegation. The initial contact by the scout ship Bellarmine had been disastrous, and all the crew had been lost. The Loroi had been so reticent about the details, the Terran diplomats suspected the fault had not been all on the Terran side. It was almost as though the aliens were embarrassed by whatever had happened.
------------------*
First out of the airlock were two Soroin in full battle armour, each carrying a ridiculously large gun. They were the ablative pointwomen – there to take the fire if this turned out to be a trap by perfidious humaniti. Although an observer might have thought their job was to be shot at, as far as they were concerned, their job was to shoot at other people. Having ensured that the location was secure, they turned their attention to the reception committee, passing opinions on the misproportioned, miscegenated humans in the sanzai equivalent of a whispered conversation.
<Typical. We finally encounter a compatible alien species with a ridiculous excess of males, and they’re all as ugly as shells.>
<We can always keep the lights out or put a bag over their heads or something.>
<It hardly seems worth the effort.>
<Now, now, don’t be so pessimistic. The males can’t all be tall, broad shouldered and muscular. There are bound to be some short and spindly pretty ones that will be worth keeping alive.>
<Like that one on the left.>
<I believe that one is a female. It’s often difficult to tell with them.>
<Oh! Oh! Look at her hair! How does she do that?!>
<I’ve got to get mine done like that!>
<Hey! I saw…>
The conversation was brought to an abrupt close by the sanzai equivalent of a loud angry clearing of the throat. The two Soroin snapped to attention. Torrai Tazites Kolee – known as Grindstone - the new Governor of Earth and its colonies had arrived to take charge. At her right-hand side walked her personal Unsheathed bodyguard, Teidar Rozzerei Azaal, although the humans’ crippled minds meant they lacked the mental capability for basic telepathy let alone any kind of psionic offence. At Grindstone’s left hand walked Mizol Torimor Vorpal, whom Grindstone was expecting to act as ambassador and first point of contact with the wretched humans. She did not want any more personal interaction with the retards than was absolutely necessary. And last, and very much least, came a very nervous Listel walking two steps behind the main group. Grindstone had not been pleased about including her. The scandalous behaviour of the Listel Tozet Eilis on the first contact with humanity had disgraced the entire Loroi race. At least that had been stamped on, but the dishonour was passed by association to the entire wretched cast. In the end Grindstone had felt obliged, against her better judgement, to bring one. The Emperor insisted that a clear and accurate record of their annexation of humanti be made.
Grindstone was a veteran and a casualty of twenty-five years of total war against the Umiak. All emotion and hope and pity had been burned out of her; a soul turned to stone by conflict. Everything and everyone she cared about had been taken away from her so often that she no longer allowed herself the luxury of attachment and empathy, or any sympathy for such weaknesses in others. All that remained was ingrained duty and a narrow-minded hatred of the enemy that had taken so much from her. She had forgotten why she was fighting or what the objectives of the war had been. All that mattered was to keep going for one more day. Everything else was irrelevant. But with that had come the realisation that victory was impossible. No matter how long they fought, the enemy would never stop coming, never accept defeat. Peace was unthinkable. But the only alternative was to keep fighting until everything that was good and worthwhile that she had ever known or loved was ground down to powder. All she could see was the necessity of war without end, without purpose and without hope.
By her skill (and a fair portion of luck) she was one of the few veterans to have survived 25 years of war. Now, the High Command had told her she had done her share of fighting. It was time to pull her off the front line and for her to serve the Empire in a different capacity. She had long ceased to care about promotion and had not been pleased to give up a field commission, but had accepted the orders with minimal protest, because obeying orders was what she did. What she did not realise was that she had been posted to this backwater because her superiors had reviewed her proposal on how to manage their new acquisition and knew she would have no qualms about taking the necessary action to gain maximum advantage from useless humaniti.
For Grindstone felt nothing contempt for the pathetic overreaching child race that called itself humaniti. Such arrogance to start trying to modify planets to their own needs when they were barely capable of interstellar travel. And then to choose Mars, Alpha, Proxima and Esperanza which were of no conceivable use, with no natural resources or strategic value. Mere vanity projects. Her first act would be to withdraw all support from these useless lumps of rock, once any of the primitive infrastructure that might still be of use for recycling or scrap had been removed. The population could have their independence and be left to their own devices, most likely to die forgotten, and that would be the end of that. At least the world of Aldea had helium 3 reserves that would be useful to the Empire, and a sizeable population to provide forced labour who could be replaced with mechanical automata once they had all been worked to death. A win-win situation where humanti could benefit the Empire while at the same time disposing of the useless surplus population.
The home planet Terra was barely habitable. Most of it was far too cold to be comfortable and humanti crowded into the few areas where life was sustainable. The arrogance of the pathetic little race, struggling to terraform planets in other star systems before they had even mastered their own! The vast areas of the steppes of the Asian content, enormous areas covered with useless impenetrable rain forest or arid desert, an entire empty continent covered with ice, endless useless oceans. Were these people so lacking in ambition and imagination that they hadn’t even bothered terraforming their own world to make these wastelands habitable and productive? The Historians claimed that they had been secretly heating up the atmosphere for the last two hundred years, in preparation for the Loroi to move in, but the Historians said a lot of things. She wasn’t sure that she believed them.
-----------------*
To the Commodore, all the Loroi delegation looked young, but he knew that Loroi didn’t age the way humans do. The leader was clearly the oldest. Rather than wrinkles, Loroi develop elongated chins and noses and a general sharpening of their features as they grow old, which, despite his many years of diversity awareness training, he couldn’t help thinking of as ‘the wicked witch of the west’ look.
“You were right about one thing,” said the Attaché. “They are cute.” She rolled her eyes when she saw the expressions on her male colleagues’ faces. “What? This is the 22nd century you know.”
“Our only hope is that Earth has something to offer them,” muttered the Admiral gloomily.
“Like what? Their technology is at least a century ahead of us.”
They examined the Loroi delegation critically.
“Professional hair styling?” suggested the Commodore.
The Loroi began the short walk across the Arrivals Hall. The Terran delegation drew themselves up to their full height and the Commodore gave the signal for the welcome music to begin.
------------------*
<What is that sound?> growled Grindstone.
<I think it’s their equivalent of music,> replied Vorpal, careful to reflect her chief’s displeasure.
<Recorded music? How pathetic. Are they offering us insult?> Grindstone gave a sanzai prompt to the Soroin to ready their weapons.
<Probably not. Having no sanzai ability, they have never created any art as we would understand it. Indeed, their crippled and limited minds mean they are incapable of even understanding…”
Her voice trailed away as the music of humanti impinged into her consciousness. Slowly, she sank to her knees.
<Danger!> broadcast the Teidar, then she stopped like a mechanical toy whose battery had suddenly gone flat.
Grindstone looked upwards with unseeing eyes at the star-laden sky filled with her warships as an unrelenting torrent of Wagner poured into her mind.
--------------*
The Terran delegation watched in puzzlement as the Loroi stopped halfway across the Arrivals Hall as though dazed. The two soldiers at the front had dropped their big guns and hugged each other. One of the ones in ruby red dropped to her knees. The one at the back had collapsed. And the wicked witch of the west stood still and gazed up into the star-filled sky with an expression of religious awe. A thin dribble of saliva ran from her open mouth. The Admiral saw lights illuminating all along the Loroi fleet. At first, he wondered why they were opening their porthole shutters. Then he realised they weren’t portholes but guns. The blasters of the entire fleet were powering up, and he was looking down the glowing gun barrels.
------------------*
Music plays a strange role in a telepathic race, who convey emotions as well as information directly without clumsy and imprecise speech or text or sound. All the emotion, the pathos, the anger, the happiness, is transferred direct from the mind of the musician to the audience, with usually only a single instrument to accompany the singer, no more than a placeholder, a framework to hold and give rhythm to the song. Recorded music for the Loroi would be ridiculous – a hollow and emotionless shadow with no more emotion than the ticking of a clock. But this meant that the Loroi had never created the music of lesser mentally stunted races like humanity, who, bereft of the ability to share emotions directly, had no option to develop complex, polyphonic music with layers of upon layer of texture and meaning that conveyed emotion indirectly. Mere sound without sanzai but more complex, more layered than Grindstone ever imagined could exist, conveying more emotion than any mere sanzai song. The first music she had ever heard, played at full volume in the perfect acoustics of the Arrivals Hall by the best technology of humanity, overwhelmed her brain like a deluge.
From the seed of the music the lost idealism of her youth was reborn in her soul. The glory of her race the Loroi, destined to conquer and rule! All the sacrifice! All the lost lives! All the destruction! It was all worth it, no matter how long it took, no matter what the cost! Because in the end the Loroi were the perfect race, the master lifeform, who would bring order and control and civilisation to all the races of the galaxy and dominate them by right! To expand their Empire until they could take their rightful place amongst the gods themselves! To enter with them into the Valhalla to live in magnificent harmony forever! It would be glorious!
The music came to its triumphant finale. Grindstone shook her head, disorientated, for a moment wondering where she was. Vorpal was on her knees, tears streaming down her face. The two Soroin let go of each other. The Teidar suddenly sprang alert, like a statue coming to life. The Listel was curled up in a foetal ball, sobbing. Of course, she’d be able to hear the marvellous music over and over again in her head in all its splendour. The lucky biloch. Above her the Loroi ships had drifted from their precision formation. Some were coming closer to the station or each other than protocol permitted. They would have been monitoring the proceedings and heard the music too. Yellow flowers of hastily fired manoeuvring thrusters blossomed over the ships as the crews came back to their senses and scrambled to get back into formation. The lights from the blasters, armed in the first panic of the moment, winked out one by one.
The Terran delegation was hurrying towards them, in clear breach of the agreed protocol. Grindstone wondered if this might be an elaborate trap. In her elated state of mind, she did not care. The two Soroin hurriedly picked up their blasters, fumbling like rooks. Grindstone saw the worried looks on the Terrans’ faces and gave her guards a sanzai command to stand down.
“Are you alright?” asked the largest Terran, the one with the fancy military uniform, politely ignoring the chaos in the sky above them. Grindstone remembered she was leader of the Master Race and drew herself up to her full height.
“We are in perfect health!” she snapped, recollecting she had to use spoken communication with these… barbarians? Suddenly she was not so sure. What was this incredible power that humaniti had just shown them? “We are in no need of any… any…” At the memory of that glorious climax her voice quavered and broke. She took a deep breath and snapped sanzai instructions to her minions, to give herself a moment to regain her composure. The Terran female moved to assist the Listel, still curled up on the floor.
“Don’t worry about her,” snapped Grindstone, beginning to recover her self-assurance. “She’s only a Listel. We’ve plenty more.”
She gave an angry sanzai command to the Teidar, who hauled the Listel to her feet and shook her vigorously until her eyes came back into focus. Having restored her team to at least a resemblance of professional competence, Grindstone felt ready to speak to the Terran delegation.
“What did you do to us?”
“Do?” replied the Commodore. “I’m sorry, we meant no harm. That was just a piece of music, to welcome you to Earth. Did you find it… uncomfortable? I can only apologise.”
“Harm? No, it was magnificent. I have never felt so alive, so complete, so exhilarated. Just sound, for no more than a few bima, but so, so wonderful. Do you… do you have any more of it?”
“Why yes.”
The Attaché rolled her eyes. “God, yes. Hours and hours and hours of it.”
Grindstone looked at the Terrans with awe. “Would you excuse us a moment, I need to consult with my people.”
The Loroi walked a few yards away went into a little huddle. No words were spoken, but there was clearly a lot of mental traffic. From the way the tall one in red was fiddling with her head piece the Admiral suspected they were in urgent contact with the fleet, and probably the wider Loroi command.
After ten minutes Torimor Vorpal walked over to the Terrans. There was reverence in her voice.
“We have been authorised to renegotiate the treaty between Loroi and humaniti. We will guarantee your independence and autonomy and recognise you as neutrals in the war, so long as you have no contact with the Umiak. And you let us listen to that music. All of it.” There was a note of pleading in her voice. “Please?”
The Commodore broke into a delighted grin.
“You know, I think you’re going to love ‘Die Walküre’.
=====================*