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The “Glory Of Loll” arrived at the wall of singularities within a year of the Battle of Broken Pride, an astounding time frame, even at ultra-luminal speeds, which pushed the ship’s gravity well generators to their very limits. Most burned out before arrival, and the commander used the remaining energy of the final generator to breach the singularity barrier and enter the Human solar system with conventional engines at conventional faster than light speeds.

Almost immediately upon breaching the singularity wall, the “Glory of Loll’s” communications systems were bombarded by a tidal wave of radio and microwave transmissions, which was a relief to the Commander. There had been no way to know from without whether the Humans had survived their isolation, or simply destroyed themselves. As absurd as that sounded, they’d nearly done it before, several times over.

The Commander knew better than to set a course directly for Earth. Such a move could easily be misconstrued as an act of aggression, especially by a species as bloodthirsty as human beings. Instead the Loloths set themselves in a close orbit to an outlying dwarf planet. Once their weapons and kinetic shields were conspicuously powered down, the Loll Commander sent a system wide distress call, and waited.

Several weeks passed without a response, either electronically or in person. But on the first day of the fifth week a single ship arrived, a small shuttle class vessel, unarmed and unarmored. It hailed the Loloths in an inscrutable dialect of Galactic Standard, the result of tens of thousands of years of isolation.

The Loll commander and his first officer boarded their own shuttle and met the humans at an abandoned military station which was also in stable orbit around the planetoid the humans called Pluto.

Four hours later the two parties were face to face, so to speak, at a desk in the center of the dead station. The human contingent consisted of a male and a female of their race, both wearing thin pressure suits.

Commander KyuTanLol and his first mate, BacKraLoll, “stood” opposite the humans. Loloths were not a physically aggressive species, their corporeal forms consisting of malleable, self contained collections of jelly textured fluids and soft tissue. There was no front of a Loloth, nor back of a Loloth, nor any genders to speak of, although the feminine was agreed as the universal pronoun for interspecial communication.

Each Loloth was a near genetic copy of each other Loloth, with all genetic diversity being artificially and volitionally introduced to the species by the Loloth’s themselves only as necessary to prevent individual or species wide biological hazards. The naming and title distinctions between each Loloth were a purely cultural addition required for admission onto the Federation council, one which the Loloth’s found superfluous but inoffensive.

To the outside observer the Loloths across from the humans appeared unprotected by vacuum, their mother of pearl mass held high and near cylindrical. In reality, the Loloths were surrounded in a self maintained bubble of atmosphere, held in place by their inborn ability to manipulate gravity, the thin atmosphere continually replenished by the complex ecosystem of their own internal biology.

The Loloths created a slight bioluminescence on a small portion of their skin and oriented it toward the humans, a frequent tactic when dealing with lesser species with facial features, in order to alleviate the discomfort of speaking to the faceless Loloth.

For a time the four beings simply sat in silence. Commander KyuTanLol noted, somewhat impressed, how well these two humans kept their minds absolutely clear of all thoughts, safe from Loloth intrusion. KyuTanLol suspected the mental training required for such a feat accounted for the several week delay in the human response.

At last, the Loloth Commander “spoke,” his psychic voice penetrating the suits and minds of the humans, as gently as possible.

Humans. The Galaxy is at war. Invaders from intergalactic space have come. They are nameless and powerful beyond comprehension. Our fleet has been destroyed, and the enemy forces now spread across the Galaxy, killing everything in their wake.

The two humans remained stony faced, briefly looking at one another, their minds remarkably silent. No doubt they had been specially chosen for this meeting with an eye toward their mental fortitude. It was the female who responded with her thoughts.

You trap us for millenia, isolate us from the galaxy, and now ask for our help?

Commander KyuTanLol waited for the human to say more, but nothing came, a bad sign. An anxious gurgle of fluid churned within the her pill shaped frame.

Yes.

The male human remained stoic. The female human began to laugh silently inside of her helmet. When she had finished she spoke again.

And the other council species? Where are they? Why send the Loloth alone?

We are the only survivors of the first encounter with the enemy. We came of our own accord.

The humans were stoic again. No one doubted humanity’s brute military supremacy, but even a human being could appreciate the catastrophe of losing an entire fleet of Hiddrell battle cruisers – as well as appreciate the power of any enemy capable of such destruction.

And in exhange for our aid?

Here the Commander faltered. In truth, she was not authorized to be having this conversation, let alone to make terms with Humanity. Indeed, according to official Federation history, this meeting was an impossibility. Her word could not bind the Federation, or the Council.

So the Commander offered the only thing she knew she could assure.

Escape.

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