Chapter 23

Mark woke up to a view of the planet Norsvund’ka. It was a lush-looking planet with a lot of greens and blues, much like every other planet, but what made this planet unique was that it had a ring around it. Not a normal ring made of ice and rocks, like Saturn. No, they had manufactured this wide flat white ring. Mark could see several ships travelling about, so he guessed the ring was like a massive space station that encircled the entire planet.

It was actually quite a beautiful sight, although he snapped out of his reverie when the Federation embassy floated between the ship and the planet. With everything that had gone on at Braga, Mark had completely forgotten that they had already built an orbital embassy for the Norn. Cricket reminded him that the embassy was already operational. ‘It’s been in your daily reports for more than a secton now.’

Mark got out of bed and proceeded to his office for coffee and the daily reports. Nothing new to report, short of the little ship appearing out by Rift 13 again and still not responding to any hails. It wasn’t harming anyone, and it followed the same path each time they detected it, so that had Mark thinking it was probably some sort of unmanned patrol craft. The big question being, ‘What was it patrolling for and who did it belong to?’

That was something they would need to investigate, but as long as it kept doing its little patrol route, there was no rush and it could wait. As he finished his reports, he looked back and paid specific attention to the report from the Norsvund’ka embassy. The numbers were lower than he expected for being operational for more than a secton, so he’d have to inquire into that.

With his daily reports finished, he proceeded out to the common room. Someone was usually up making breakfast by the time he finished his reports, but if not, then he would take it upon himself to get breakfast started. Rounding the corner to the eatery, Mark found Luna and Ra’ki, but they weren’t making breakfast. Instead, Ra’ki was sitting on top of the counter with her legs in the air and Luna’s head was between Ra’ki’s thighs.

Seeing the erotic sight before him, he didn’t want to interrupt them, so he walked as silently as possible up to the counter. It was quite easy to do with the background hum of the life support system that you didn’t really even notice after a short while.

Once he got close, he made his presence known by asking, “Do you two need a hand with anything?”

Without looking at Mark or breaking contact with Ra’ki’s pussy, Luna pushed the lizard girl further onto the counter and then crawled up on the counter herself.

In that position though, Luna’s pussy was face high for Mark.

Taking that as an invitation, he moved forward, leaned in and kissed her heart tattoo and perfect ass before spreading her puffy pussy lips, exposing her soaked pink slit, which he happily licked deep to extract sweet nectar from the Silican beauty.

It surprised Mark when she came so quick, but once her orgasm subsided, she climbed off the counter, leaving her ass pointed to Mark and her upper body still on the counter as she attended to Ra’ki’s sex.

Mark undid his pants and let them fall around his feet as he rubbed his cock up and down Luna’s slit for lubrication before sliding deep inside the tall Silican beauty.

Luna groaned at the impalement, closing her eyes and biting her bottom lip as she enjoyed the sensations of Mark’s cock as it grew to fill her cunt; the feeling of being fucked so deeply was driving the Silican beauty wild.

With her pussy no longer being attended to, Ra’ki took Luna’s hand, formed it into a fist and then guided inside herself. Luna then snapped out of her reverie as she could feel Ra’ki squeezing her hand and wrist as it worked inside the yellow-skinned sexpot.

Soon Luna took over and began fisting deep into Ra’ki as Mark continued to pound her pussy. The sight and sound of Ra’ki getting fisted, keeping Mark’s cock as hard as a rock.

It didn’t take long for Mark to reach the point of no return as he thrust as deep inside Luna as he could and just held her hips as his cock twitched, unleashing its load deep inside. Prompting Luna’s second orgasm and starting Ra’ki’s orgasm from the furious fisting she was experiencing.

Sometime during their fun, Selena had come out of her room and was sitting at a nearby table behind Mark. She simply smiled and said, “What do I need to do to get on breakfast duty? That looks like fun!”

Luna laughed. “You’re a bit young for this part, but you’re welcome to help with breakfast anytime!”

Selena simply licked her lips as Mark pulled out of Luna, allowing a dollop of cum to leak out and drop to the floor. Selena simply grabbed some wipes from the kitchen dispenser and handed them to the trio. “Clean up! We put food on this counter, you know! Just so you know, I have had sex before!”

The three adults laughed as they climbed off the counter, cleaned themselves up, put on their clothes, and then wiped down the countertop.

A centon later, the others had emerged from their rooms. Annabelle was surprised that breakfast hadn’t been made as she asked, “Where’s breakfast?”

Selena laughed and pointed to the cum splatter on the floor. “Mark made some batter, but Luna’s keeping it all to herself. While Mark did that, Luna was giving Ra’ki a hand, but there’s nothing to show for it. The worst thing, though, is that they wouldn’t let me help with breakfast! I think they need to start over.”

Annabelle caught on to the innuendo as she walked up to Luna. As she slipped her hand down the front of Luna’s pants, Luna closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. After some obvious rubbing, Luna was breathing heavily as Annabelle withdrew her hand, revealing her cum-coated fingers which she licked clean. “Mmmm, the best batter!”

Everyone laughed as they made French toast, since it was the fastest and easiest meal to make. They even let Selena run one griddle.

In the middle of breakfast, though, Cricket announced. “The Norn are requesting permission to land.”

Mark said, “Permission granted! We’ll meet them down in the starboard landing bay.”

Everyone stuffed the rest of their breakfast into their mouths and deposited their plates, cutlery and glasses into the recycle bin as they exited the common room.

They hastily made their way down to level 3 and then to the starboard landing pod, realizing they’d never actually checked out the starboard bay. It was definitely a flex space. The front part had what looked like guest rooms or possibly holding cells, and then it was just a wide open landing bay.

Two grey flying saucers entered the landing pod and touched down in front of the group. The Norn saucers were considerably bigger than the Federation shuttles, but were likely just as advanced. They just seemed archaic with that design. The ships were still small when compared to the size of the landing pod.

With one segment of the saucer opening upwards, the opposite side opened down, creating a ramp into the ship. The interior seemed brightly lit, but it looked a bit confining. Anyone taller than 5-foot would definitely have to duck their heads inside the craft. It was a good thing they were a short people, they could stand upright. Ambassador Junga appeared at the top of the ramp, with less than 6 inches of clearance above his head.

The passengers from each of the ships congregated as a group in front of the impromptu greeting party. Each ship carried 8 people, so it was a fair-sized group that had arrived unexpectedly.

Junga stepped forward to greet Mark and, after greeting each other with a simple nod of their head, the Ambassador introduced everyone else. With him were the 15 elected eminences, representing each of 4 continents on the planet and the 11 segments of the ring.

The other 2 people merely got a passing mention of their roles as pilots and security without actually introducing either of them. Similar to humans, the Norn skin tones were all different shades of grey, none of them were taller than 5-foot and they all had the oblong, slanted black eyes and a small mouth. Their noses merely a slight bump on their face with slits.

9 of the 15 elected eminences were female, and it was the first time Mark and the gang had ever seen Norn females. Their bodies were quite similar to the males, though the females had small breasts, slightly pronounced hips, and their asses were a bit more rounded. The belts they wore made the loose toga-like sheets more form fitting. Except for two females that had larger breasts and the fact that all the females wore cosmetics, it would be tough to tell the difference between male and female with just a passing glance. Fortunately, they all wore sashes which contained the name of their region and their name.

Mark welcomed them to the Galatea and then introduced everyone from his group that was there, including Maren, Gyges and Athena.

Since it was a spur-of-the-moment event, Mark was about to ask if they would like to meet in the boardroom, then realized they might be hungry. “With your unexpected arrival, I admit I’m unprepared. Would you like to sit down and talk in our boardroom? Are you hungry? We just finished breakfast, but we could always fix you something as well.”

It seemed like none of the Norn were going to take the lead in speaking, which was odd considering they were all politicians and they were the ones that had initiated the visit. Junga shook his head and took the lead. “We do not require nourishment at this time. Thank you for the offer. Our apologies for the unexpected visit. We noticed you arrived last night, but when we contacted you, they simply informed us you were unavailable. Since we haven’t talked recently, we were unsure of your plans, so we wanted to speak with you before you interfaced with our people.”

Mark chuckled. “That’s one problem with the hyperspace gates. Travelling doesn’t take long enough. We went to sleep orbiting Braga, and we woke up orbiting Norsvund’ka. You don’t have time to adjust your sleep so that you’re awake when you arrive at a planet.”

Eminence Soriya chuckled as the rest of her cohorts looked at her, her skin tone darkened a bit with embarrassment. She explained, “Our apologies. It was not a problem we had considered. With the newfound ability to travel anywhere instantly, we have only been using the gates to visit other worlds and then return home. We had not considered that staying for an extended period in one location may disrupt a body’s sleep schedule.”

Mark nodded, “I guess we could also actually tell you we are currently sleeping.”

Cricket then popped into existence. “It’s my fault, actually. Upon arriving, we actually stayed out near the hyperspace gate during the majority of the crew’s sleep. I only moved closer to the planet when Mark woke up, thinking it would be nice for him to wake up to a lovely view of the planet. He wakes up way earlier than everyone else.”

Mark dismissed her apology, “Thanks Cricket, it was a nice thought. I appreciated the spectacular view while I was going through my morning routine.” Mark then clued in to something they had said as he looked at the Norn. “You don’t want us to interact with your people?”

The Norn contingent all looked down and avoided eye contact, seeming to be at an impasse with no one stepping forward as the definitive leader to answer his question.

To move the awkward conversation along, Junga looked around, “Not at all, your embassy just became operational a few days ago and we’ve already done a public announcement with your ambassador. I’m not sure if anyone has visited your embassy yet, though, besides us and the media that accompanied us.”

Mark interjected with some statistics, “I’m not sure how many were in your original contingent, but 84 people have visited the embassy to date.”

Junga smiled. “Good! I’m sure word will spread and more will visit. As that happens, their trust level will improve. When we made the announcement upon our return from Earth, several rumours started you were going to conquer us and that the gate you were building was so you could move large numbers of those massive warships to destroy us, etc. Our population has much anxiety and trepidation about meeting aliens. It stems from the reports from our previous unpleasant experiences with meeting other races being made public. It has spawned many movies about aliens either invading or enslaving us. Before the Federation, though, no one has ever actually visited our planet. Would you mind waiting a couple of days and we’ll do another announcement with you?”

Mark was disappointed, but understood the hesitancy of the Norn people. “Sure, we can wait for a couple of days. Didn’t you previously meet with the Mazjik?”

“Every time we have met the Mazjik, it was simply the crossing of our paths as we both were exploring space. They found our planet many millennia ago, but their practices of not interfering with planets until they reach a certain level of evolution meant they just moved on by. Speaking of Mazjik, I’ve never been on one of their ships before. May we have a tour?”

Cricket took it upon herself to correct the assumption. “Actually, this is not a Mazjik ship. It’s a Nereid-class ship of Atlantean design. The exterior is based on the larger Defender-class ships created by the Mazjik, and the Federation has two of those, but the interior of this ship is completely Atlantean and very different.”

The Norn seemed disappointed that this was not a Mazjik ship, but Mark offered to give them a tour, anyway.

Although it was much smaller than a Sentinel or even a Defender, it still took a while for the short-legged Norn to walk around the ship. Fortunately, they only had to walk around the front section of the ship as the factory bay and landing pods were basically large, open, mostly unused areas. So really, it was a tour of medical and the library, followed by the bridge and living area, then finally up to the park at the top.

During the tour, though, the Norn relaxed and talked a little more openly. They eventually admitted that, in their society, the eminences all had equal status. They just made sure there were always an odd number of them, so there was never a stalemate in their voting.

For the benefit of the eminences, Junga asked, “How do you and the Federation handle interacting with new planets?”

Mark suspected the eminences always wanted them to have more contact with planets, but previous experiences hadn’t worked out so well for them in the past.

Mark recounted his own experiences with meeting new planets and even his experiences with visiting other countries on his home planet after he had been in contact with the aliens. Mark said, “It’s natural to not trust the unknown. I’ve lost count of how many times they’ve tried to kill me! That is why everywhere I go, that is not controlled by Federation security, I always wear my personal shield and have cloaked security drones following me.”

That revelation surprised the Norn. Even though he was human, he still had to deal with everything they had experienced with the few times they had tried contacting new civilizations and planets. Junga made sure he iterated what the Mazjik had told them long ago about interfering with other planets.

The Norn continued to ask many questions and eventually wound up in the boardroom listening to Liyana as she went through her normal Federation recruitment spiel, since that was the most condensed everything-about-the-Federation speech that answered most of the common questions.

In the end, they confirmed their decision to remain independent for the time being, with just the orbital embassy and the open lines of communication, trade and tourism with the rest of the Federation. They also reaffirmed their position of cooperatively protecting the 9 planets they had been watching over. After all, the Federation had proven themselves far more capable than the Norn when dealing with the Destructor threat, plus the Federation had plans to contact those planets to discuss their joining the Federation.