"I hope you found the book helpful even though you didn't need a primer on the opposable thumb."

"It was extremely informative!"

"I'll tell the author you said so! Do you happen to have a way to tell if our food will be safe for you?"

"Yes, we brought appropriate scanning equipment."

"Would you like to come to dinner at the Presidential Residence, assuming initial scans of - does someone have snacks on them?"

A green has a bag of fruit.

"Assuming initial scans suggest it's not unlikely to be edible?"

"That sounds like a fine idea!"

Another one of his handful of techs comes forward to scan the bag of fruit. The scanner pronounces it edible.

"Marvelous. We've got plenty of room for your party in these cars here."

Friendly mercenaries pile into cars!

Cars proceed from the landing site towards a city on cordoned-off roads. People can be seen peeking out of windows and from past the cordon.

Icalena is in a car with Miles. "Are you an exploratory party?"

"Not as such, no. Actually we're a mercenary fleet."

"Really? Why this jump, then?"

"Evading pursuit by an interplanetary empire we recently annoyed. Jumping through an unexplored wormhole is risky; they'll have expected us to keep going along the charted route, and when we appear to have vanished instead, even if they think of checking all the blind jumps behind all the offshoots along the chain, it would be insane for them to actually try it."

"What's the associated risk?"

"Sometimes a ship goes into a wormhole and doesn't come out again. Second most common cause is a new pilot's first jump; the most common is a jump through an unexplored wormhole. We assume most of the rest are equipment failures - a tighter maintenance schedule improves your odds; so does a more experienced pilot - but it's hard to say for sure, because you can't recover wreckage from a failed jump, the ship is just gone."

"How is jumping done?"

"A jump drive operates on some of the same principles as gravity manipulation technology, which we also have, and to operate one successfully you need a jump pilot with specialized cybernetic implants. The ship approaches the wormhole, disappears, and reappears out the other end a few seconds later, unless something went wrong in which case it doesn't."

"...that seems challenging to have invented in the first place, do you happen to know the history of the technology?"

"Yes, I got curious about that once too. So, it turns out you can build a jumpship that'll cross a wormhole without a pilot - in one out of ten tries. The other nine ships never make it to the other side - and then you've got the same odds of failure on the return jump. Somebody on pre-Jump Earth was sufficiently convinced of their theory to keep flinging expensive machinery into the void until some of it finally came back. As for the pilots - the trouble with autopiloting through a wormhole is that no computer is adaptable enough, you have to make too many decisions too quickly based on too complex a model - and cybernetics technology was just getting going at the time, and a pilot sitting at a console wouldn't nearly be able to move fast enough to input the right commands, but hook their brain directly into the computer and they've got a decent chance."

"It comes as a surprise to me that computers lose on complexity and speed."

"'Complexity and speed' is an oversimplified summary. It's more the wrong kind of complexity than too much of it. Computers aren't any good at, oh, diplomatic negotiations either, and those afford much longer response times and more leeway to survive small errors."

"I wonder how difficult it would be to adapt the implant procedure to Amentan brains."

"It'll be interesting to find out. There are various tests and signs to detect people with the right kind of brain to be a jump pilot, but of course none of them were designed with Amentans in mind."

"I'm sure we'll have no shortage of volunteers. We've wanted to be able to go looking for planets to live on for a long time."

"I expect Betan Astronomical Survey will be delighted to accept some Amentan recruits, even if you don't start producing pilots right away. A survey team needs more than just a working ship to bop around in."

"Oh? What else is customary?"