First Contact

Set chronologically some time after the events of "Interval's End", when Cyrus is dead.

Inquestor Slithiz of the Argubadian Faunocracy ruffled her wings, blinked her six eyes, shuffled her suctopeds, brushed her numerous pets away, and made popping noises with her proboscis, all through a surfeit of nervousness. Every eye in the room – which, when a room was filled with Argubadines, was very very many indeed – was riveted on the matterthrower, four-columned and ecologically pleasing, in the centre of the leafy room.
Inquestor Slithiz closed her many eyes and remembered how this bloody affair had started. It had had the most ignominious of beginnings, truly – some little boy of the Khanati, one of the Arbugadine's allied spacefaring races, on some benighted colony in a region of space characterised by Eks banditry, had, being an insufferable genius, built himself a little radio – as if that wouldn't bring the aforementioned Eks raiders down on his planet. Not only that, but this radio had the capability to pick up signals from space – unknown space, actually, making this child just about one of the most intelligent Khanati ever to have lived.
Probably strangest of all, the radio had begun picking up signals.
“Inquestor Slithiz!” An eager young Arbugadine by the name of Dermicbowl prodded her with her proboscis – all Arbugadines were female. “Inquestor Slithiz!” Slithiz flapped her pallid wings, bowling over another Arbugadine, and turned to face Dermicbowl.
“What, Dermicbowl, is it you could desire at such an inopportune time?”
“The Faunocratine desires a situational report, Inquestor.”
“Exactly the bloody same as five minutes ago!” Slithiz blew bubbles through her proboscis again. How had she ended up with this bloody assignment?
Oh yes. The Khanati had asked the Argubadines – as their newest ally, still fresh from the egg of their world – to handle this first-contact situation. The Faunocrat, of course, back on Bthyryz Amorgana, had consulted the animalcular oracles and of course, the oracles had interpreted, they should accept! This was a grea big step in the cultural development of the Argubadine Faunocracy, blah le blah le blah le blah. And Inquestor Slithiz, previously Inferior Pen-Pusher Slithiz in the unforgiving Morcunian Arbugadine language she spoke, had been pulled from a nice cosy job and flung halfway across an admittedly very tiny space empire to shepherd some new species into space and to hoover them into the Khanati web of intrigue they called an alliance.
The radio – well, the Arbugadine equivalent of a radio - buzzed, bringing Slithiz back from her vaguely furious daydream. A harsh, barking voice, unlike the natural trills and pops that constituted most of the Argubadine languages, came through, spitting some barbaric foreign tongue through its flower speakers. Those messages had started coming in, as soon as they'd started orbiting this cesspit of a planet three days ago. The translators had been doing their best on translating the language, but somehow, Slithiz doubted that the alien's enigmatic words really meant “Bob's hot dog doing dance banana banana going down.” Eventually, in frustration, she had ordered the ship to grow a matterthrower and send it down in an unwomanned (as it were) capsule. Like all the technology of the nature-loving Arbugadines, they had literally grown the matterthrower. It hadn't always been like that, of course: but when they discovered genetic engineering, they couldn't resist using it to make more natural machines. The matterthrower, in essence, did exactly what it said: it flung matter through Lodgespace, whatever that was (Slithiz wasn't properly sure herself) and popped it down on another matterthrower. They had, of course, no guarantee that the aliens could even conceptualise technology as advanced as a matterthrower, but no less than three minutes and thirty seven seconds ago, they had received a message which the translators deemed to be “Bob's hot dog used matterthrower laundry possible soon.”
This was why Slithiz was standing on the wooden floor of her wooden spaceship, watching this bloody matterthrower, waiting patiently for nothing to happen.
She was disappointed.
A flicker – no more – graced their end of the matterthrower. Slithiz failed to show any emotion, but underneath, she was astounded: these aliens could use a matterthrower.
Maybe they could move on to numbers next.
A stronger flicker came, then repeated itself, growing slowly into a continuous-ish buzz of light and sound as the Lodgespace route between the two matterthrowers was established. The whole room shushed as one, a chorus of trills and pops silencing suddenly. Even the Arbugadines' pets shut themselves up. The tension was thick enough to be cut with a knife.
Then the alien boot took its first step into space.
A figure, robed in green trimmed with red and tall – at least half again as tall and broad as any of the Arbugadines – stepped through.
“Greetings.” it smiled, the translators working furiously. “I am Gunnarus Asmodaeus of Ostmark, in Jotunheim, and I come on behalf of the Akarean Empire.”