The Cor Leonis is a 150-meter nineteenth-generation escort frigate equipped with a third-generation antigravity compensator and modern weaponry, and her captain does know just what she is transporting, making Jinton-ji Su Maurya Veninheim one of the very few people in the Empire in on the secret of exactly where its new rulers come from. Her purpose is to quietly collect Jinye Attani Cocoon from the minor mining base that is (off-the-books) a corporate research facility working on optimizing illegal gambling software and (further off the books) is Cocoon Academy, and take her to Tsirona. For this purpose, the Cor Leonis is passing through the wormhole connecting Al Afthar to Cheleb. One fortified station is visible on the Al Afthar side, one fortified station is visible on the Cheleb side, both keeping the wormhole balanced and open - no difficulties visible - 

The Cor Leonis passes through the wormhole and both stations, with accompanying systems, vanish. Or, from a very different point of view, the Cor Leonis does, instead.

From yet another point of view, something emerges from Ring #802 that is definitely not supposed to be there.

The Cor Leonis exits the wormhole via a structure their engineers might recognize as a wormhole station, if they had to speculate on its function, but it looks like nothing like an Attani wormhole-station, nor indeed anything they would know to be built by humans at all. It's an enormous ring, wide enough to fit a hundred Corda Leonum abreast, and it opens onto a space encompassed by similar rings in a rough spherical pattern a million kilometers across. At the center (too far away to be seen with the naked eye, but presumably they have scopes) is a spherical object of similar alien make to the rings, and near that, what looks like an ancient generation ship, clearly parked there, with weapons attached to it that it almost certainly was not originally meant to have.

On board that former generation ship, now called Medina Station, an OPA sentry is roused from his half-slumber by an alarm. Unauthorized transit of Ring #802. Oh well, the Belt is still kind of getting used to the whole having laws thing. Still, he shouldn't ignore it, even if it is just some kids who thought it would be fun to fly dark around the unexplored trans-Ring systems.

He sends them a radio message, which won't be according to any communications protocols they know, but it's not encrypted or anything; if they have the expectation that it's audio, they should be able to decipher it without too much trouble.

"Unidentified vessel transiting Ring 802. Please state your name, affiliation, and flight plan." Technically it's illegal to enter the Ring Space without a transponder on but he's not going to bring that up. Yet.

When they cross, Jinye is quietly copying, from best memory, the contents of a virus intended to fill her new Tsironan bank account into her handheld, and while she does casually looking at Central Computing's avatar, which sits in the corner, quietly reading.

"So, I assume there's no news that Ajian Madurai should have, yet?"

The cheerful, young Adjutant avatar smiles and begins to shake his head.

"Not as of y-"

His childlike face withers in an instant.

"Emergency stations, Jinye, 23ce."

"Code yellow," says Su. "All stations, code yellow." 

(To the station's eye, the Cor Leonis starts twitching, accelerating in random directions at erratic-but-rapid intervals.)

"Ilton-ji Shu, ready rapid evasion. Telton-ji Vora, Recalibrate sensors," says Su, her every nerve suddenly alive and her voice still completely calm. "I want to know what's really out there. Ilton-ji Maien, comms update?"

The lieutenant's response was not quite as steady, but not far off. "Unencrypted radio, Jinton-ji, unfamiliar accent. Source is the station."

"Play it for me."

Jinye has seen Teacher looking this old exactly never. The code yellow flashes across the ship and there's no immediate response.

Situation 23: The ship has been teleported through an unknown Gate. It's theoretically impossible according to standard models of physics but you'd only need to one theorized law to be wrong for opening a Gate an inch inside another Gate to be possible. The obvious reason for a hijacking is so Jinye, Jinye's genes, Jinye's knowledge, and the chip inside Jinye's head can fall into the possession of a hostile galactic power.

There is a series of acceptable responses ranging from attempting to destroy as much as possible of this with welding equipment to hiding under the bed, and there is also the response she does take, included in the list she was encouraged but not mandated by Central Computing to take, which is to pull out her pocketknife, flip its screwdriver attachment open, and get to work on her cabin door's inside control panel.

There is no immediate response from the Attani ship, other than the odd, almost reactionless twitching it makes.

What the actual fuck is that ship doing. And more importantly, how.

Obviously you couldn't twitch like that with your main drive (which the ship doesn't appear to be using), but even thrusters have pretty distinctive heat signatures, and the scopes aren't showing anything like that either. (They don't have good enough resolution to actually get a good look at the ship, or it would be much more obvious that it wasn't built by any humans the OPA knows.)

—it occurs to him that the ship's strange behavior might make tactical sense if it were expecting a hail of PDC fire that is not in fact incoming. The fact that they moved to this stance immediately pretty much banishes the possibility of it being random Belter kids and is also, separately, concerning, insofar as it reveals something their expectations for this encounter.

He fires off a highest-priority ping to the captain. It's the middle of the night shift and she's going to be pissed if this turns out to be nothing but the chances of that, right now, seem vanishingly small.

Camina Drummer is woken by a repeating pattern of three sharp pings from her hand terminal. She disentangles herself from Michio, who's stirring beside her, stands up, and clears the sleep from her eyes before answering.

"This better be fucking important," she says in a low, even voice.

"Rogue ship out of one of the Rings. Flying totally dark but it seems to have adopted what I can only guess is a combat stance. Hasn't answered my hail.

"I think you're gonna want to see this for yourself."

"Copy intense-scan," says Telton-ji Astra Vora Suiban. She's been staring at her scanners and checking and rechecking both sides of the gate, and - 

"Intense-scan complete," she says. "Reports are accurate. We are where we seem to be, Jinton-ji."

Emperor's ass, thinks the ship's captain. If we're being kidnapped, the least they could do would be to tell us why.

The door to Jinye's cabin swings open. The two marines guarding her spin; one of them backs up a stage, the other turns towards her. FThe first's hand needler has left its holster but is pointed down, the second has a lightning gun readied. Neither is wearing full Attani battle armor, just the Empire's standard bullet-resistant uniforms.

"Override 7783," says Jinye, inventing out of whole cloth. (They blink.) "Take me to the bridge."

"I don't -"

"Your captain does. Take me to her."

(Central Computing's avatar, now back to Adjutant, smirks at Jinye in passing. Describing her as 'his favorite student' would be to anthromorphize him far too much, but his expected future utility is much higher because she exists.)

The marines at the bridge part, and the door swings open to admit Jinye.

"What are you doing on the bridge, cadet?"

Jinye takes it all in, with one glance at the bridge, one look at the station, one stare at where we are, and one goddamned fast smile. She raises her hand, waits for the captain to fall silent while she thinks.

"Jinton-ji," she says, very calmly. "That is not any design of any ship we know." The more obvious things she says, the more time she has to think. "Do you really want to be the one who manages first contact?"

Oh goddamn it.

She isn't supposed to do this, ever - she types in an emergency alert code, glances down at the screen that folds out of the arm of her command chair.

Central Computing flashes on to her screen.

"An Attani decision, Jinton-ji. Not for me to make."

"To be made by Jinye Attani Cocoon, then."

"Jinye Attani Attani," she says. "Let's not spill any state secrets, shall we? Play the message again."

By the time Drummer's dressed and at the station, the message she hears is a calm, "This is Attani Imperial frigate Cor Leonis, commanded by Shoi Shaogen-ji Jinye Attani Attani. Identify yourself, unknown station."

Back on Medina Station—

What—no, there'll be time for questions when the chance of them all dying is firmly back to its background level of "surrounded by vacuum in an alien dimension no one actually understands".

She throws on a uniform and makes her way to the bridge as fast as possible. It still takes a few minutes.

—she takes a look at the scopes and is no longer upset about being woken up in the middle of the night. Jules-Pierre Mao is presumably rotting in a hole at the bottom of a gravity well, but the technology behind his infamous stealth fleet now belongs to Earth, and if they've somehow managed to launch a surprise attack on the Ring Space, well, the OPA is not prepared. She'd been counting on the fact that no one on Earth seemed to realize that the Ring Space was now the strategic chokepoint of human civilization, but the chances of that ignorance lasting long enough for the Belt to get Medina properly defended were always questionable.

"Tightbeam to Fred Johnson, now," she says to the computer, which duly awaits her message.

"Attack on Ring Space by unknown stealth forces presumably UN," she dictates at a rapid clip. "Likely outmatched no plans to surrender requesting available backup."

Now that she at least might be avenged if they all die in the next five minutes, she turns to the sentry. "Any communications from them since you pinged me?"

He plays the message.

The what commanded by who.

If it were the UN in disguise, probably they'd come up with a less bizarre cover story? But, then again, maybe that's exactly what they expected her to think. Her mind isn't exactly coming up with a lot of other possibilities here. If it were literal actual aliens, they wouldn't speak English. With, she thinks, a lot of Chinese in there? And the ship's name might be Latin—Earther languages weren't her specialty.

"This is Commander Camina Drummer of Medina Station," she replies. "Outer Planets Alliance, Sol system," she adds, just in case it is somehow aliens. "I've never heard of the faction you just mentioned. My current assumption is that you're hostile UN or Martian forces, possibly some kind of stealth black ops. You have a rather short time to make any other explanation seem remotely plausible before we fire."

"The alternate explanation is that this is first recontact, Medina Station. Our homeworld was colonized from Earth centuries ago," and has resettled its still-smoking ruins, "and do you really want to be the woman whose biography, read ten thousand years later, reads, 'met foreign-divergent civilization, then murdered its representatives?' If you want to shoot me you'll be in just as good a position to do it in an hour, after your reinforcements have arrived."

And, dropping out of communications, she turns to the captain. "Get me a complete scan of that station's weapons and a firing solution that will shut them down, but don't use it unless I give an explicit command. I don't want to have to fight this thing," even if she'd dodge all its shots and cut it to pieces, sitting duck that it is, "and if it wants to fight us I'd rather shut it down as painlessly as possible."

Jinton-ji Su Maurya Veninheim is a competent officer, and in any situation in which she had any clue what was going on, she would be happy to take charge herself. But she does not, actually, want to be in charge for first contact negotiations, and Central Computing gave her an excuse not to.

So she is going to sit back, forward her new commanding officer's orders, and be very grateful there is someone on this ship who has spent the past fifteen years training to deal with the most utterly absurd bullshit anyone in the galaxy is capable of pulling, on anyone, ever, that is not her.

Okay, they're from the future, or something. That's actually...not that unbelievable? It's not expected under any laws of physics she knows but she's very aware that no one in the solar system has particularly high confidence about what the laws of physics actually are, right now. She does not in fact want to be remembered as the person who fucked this up, possibly even less than she wants to be remembered as the person who let the UN take Medina Station without a fight.

"I'm sorry for the misunderstanding," she replies almost immediately. "We mean you no hostility, if what you say is true, and you don't mean any hostility to us. We don't normally get visitors from, uh, the future or alternate universes, and I'm not sure if that's normal for you or something, but to be fair a lot of weird shit has been happening around here lately" no don't say that, probably anything to do with the Ring Builders is strategic information even if it's going to be a bit hard to hide "—tensions with the Inners are high right now—" possibly also strategic information but who doesn't have high tensions with somebody "—so we hope you understand why we made the assumptions we did, given the information we had. To be honest the main thing you have going for you, as far as me believing you, is that everyone in the inyalowda officer corps has a stick way too far up their ass to make up a story that far-fetched.

"If you'd like to come down to the station and dock so we can talk face to face, I'd be open to that, or if you'd rather stay out of railgun range until we get more things sorted out that would be understandable too, but we would appreciate it if you'd come within, like, half a light-second so we can get a live link up." Mostly she wants them to fire up their engine so she can look at their drive signature, although she wouldn't be terribly surprised if they didn't even use fusion drives.

Medina Station, seen by the Cor's high-resolution scopes, looks incredibly strange.

Medina Station, once the Behemoth, before that the Nauvoo, was originally built as a generation ship made to carry Mormon colonists to a new star system, commandeered for an absolutely ridiculous mission that left it traveling unmanned into interstellar space at a quarter the speed of light, and somehow, impossibly, salvaged by the OPA and converted into a warship. The golden statue of an angel blowing a trumpet at the tip of its bowsprit is the only outwardly visible legacy it bears of its former life.

The conversion was obviously done by a resourceful but poor civilization; the Nauvoo was never built to be a warship, and there's a small but obviously nonzero chance that the ship might tear itself apart if any of its six heavy railguns were to actually fire. Its torpedo bays have to be muzzle-loaded by drones. It looks highly unlikely that it could execute anything resembling an evasive maneuver; it was built to accelerate in a straight line up to half of its delta-v, coast for a hundred years, then turn around and slow down.

It stands approximately no chance against an actually hostile Earth or Mars battleship, never mind an Attani one, and even the people on board know this, but that doesn't mean they would go down without a fight.

She laughs politely at "stick way too far up their ass," to put Commander Drummer at her ease. "Of course, apology accepted. The Attani Empire has no hostile plans against the Outer Planets Alliance -" not that she has any idea what that is "- and we have no idea why we are -" (per the hallucinatory glowing star map that her usual hallucination of Central Computing is helpfully annotating) "- far into the past and possibly in an alternate timeline, and would be happy to come into live link range to discuss the situation."

And while she issues the orders, she surveys the situation.

To Jinye's senses, Central Computing is calmly describing the situation, sketching in the air in front of her with glowing lines of light that harden into clear pictures of useful data; an elaborate triangulation mapping plausible locations for the star behind them and what timelines that would indicate, an elaborate structural analysis of Medina Station and its weapons or lack thereof, analyses of the railguns complete with suggestions of their vulnerabilities, and a start on the technology that the Medinabuilders have based on details of the system.

He's not really doing anything the ship's computer can't do, since he is in fact using the processing power of the ship's computer plus the small amount inside Jinye's skull, but he is giving it to Jinye faster than a human being could speak it, and that is quite valuable.

What Jinye Attani Cocoon is thinking is that this situation is that she has finally grown up. Did she run any simulations in school about making first contact with a lost branch of human civilization that is - thank you, Ting - two hundred and forty-eight years in the past, and probably in a emperor-be-damned alternate timeline if they seem to be suggesting that a United Nations survived the third World War? No, no she did not. Is she totally prepared to take charge in the event that this happens? That would be a yes. Now all she needs to do is navigate their absurdly-complicated diplomacy, take over and unite the warring factions that in this timeline divide mankind, and either find a way back home or else rebuild the Neo-Attani Empire that she'd always wished she'd grown up in.

"Bring her in closer," she adds, "and see if you can make sense of any of the transmissions coming through those rings. I want to know this place."

There are transmissions coming through the gates! Mostly through one particular gate, really; there's any evidence of human activity beyond a few of the others, but most are totally quiet, or else have the patterns of radio activity you'd associate with dead stars, not living planets. (A kind of disturbing number of dead stars, actually, based on known statistical patterns of how common those are in the galaxy.) The transmissions from what-must-be-Earth are kind of distorted, as broadcast transmissions coming through the gates usually are, but they're distorted in fairly predictable ways that Ting ought to be able to account for without using too much computing power. Their data-coding formats are still based on standards originally established in the late 20th century CE, so unless the Attani had to re-invent computers completely from scratch at some point in their history, they should be able to decode them with some but not impossible difficulty.

This version of humanity has a presence on almost every solid body in the Solar System, but most of the population still lives on Earth, which is governed by the UN. Based on the flag and the presence of a Secretary-General, it's the same UN the Attani history books speak of, although it seems to have absorbed aspects of the United States government as well. Mars is the second major power. Mars and Earth recently fought a war but are at peace now. The third faction is the Belt, or the OPA (the terms are used interchangeably on Earth and Mars news reports but there are definitely some Belters who don't think the OPA speaks for them), which a lot of people on the inner planets think is basically just a bunch of pirates and terrorists, but most are willing to at least give them credit for trying to become a civilized country. Belters think Inners are colonialists and oppressors. Both Mars on the Belt think Earthers are stupid and lazy (there's some background reference to 80% of Earth's population living on government assistance and doing drugs all the time?)

The Ring Gate system is new—like, within the past year. Humanity didn't build it. There are a lot of mentions of something called a 'protomolecule', which looks like some sort of nanotechnology and is apparently related to the Gates. It's hard to understand much of these news reports—there's a lot they're assuming to be common knowledge.

Most recently, there are finally detailed reports from a colony world called Ilus or New Terra after a long period of near-total radio silence—apparently some sort of crisis was successfully averted. Someone named James Holden is featured prominently. Absolutely no information is given on his background, which seems to imply that literally everyone in the solar system is presumed to know who he is—even the Secretary-General of the United Nations gets that much in front of her name.

Drummer sends an acknowledgment to the Cor Leonis, and a false-alarm-await-further-communication message to Fred (depending on the relative positions of Tycho and the Ring, which she isn't sure about, it's possible her first message hasn't even reached him yet), and then, with some hesitation, pings Ashford.

It's not, precisely speaking, that Ashford shouldn't be involved in this. She wouldn't be pinging him yet, if he hadn't earned the right to. It's that—this is the first opportunity the new Belter state has had, maybe the only impression it will ever have, to make an impression on someone with no preconceptions of them. Even now Jinye Attani, if she has any sense, is having her crew tune in to broadcasts—inevitably, broadcasts from Earth about how Belters are all just a bunch of pirates and terrorists. She wants to be able to tell her they're wrong.

(Technically, Ashford is a pirate hunter now. Maybe he'll be off doing that.)

Ashford is, as it happens, on board, and heads straight for the bridge when he gets the ping. Drummer doesn't usually solicit his advice, which suggests this might be somewhat of a big deal.

"Commander Drummer. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"You're not going to believe this."

"I have seen many unbelievable things in my time, and not all of them in the last two years either. Try me."

"A ship showed up out of one of the rings. Claims to be from something called the Attani Empire, 248 years in the future and possibly in an alternate timeline."

"The Earther spies have gotten creative. Even I couldn't come up with that one." Ashford laughs. "Offer them a taste of our torpedoes." This last sentence is spoken more-or-less past Drummer at the weapons officer on the bridge.

"They're not Earther spies." Her voice is very firm about this.

"I went through this already. Threats to shoot them and everything. Like I told them, I don't think Earther spies are that creative, and it's not actually that much more ridiculous than anything else that's happened recently. They claim to have no hostile intentions."

"Even if they are from the future—'empire' and 'no hostile intent' are not words that belong together. We have two Inner Planets already; we do not need a third."

"I had thought of that but do not consider myself enough of an expert on the connotations of the word 'empire' in alternate-universe English to throw away the opportunity we have here. This is a pivotal moment for the new Belter state. We are speaking for the system now, but whatever good they have to offer this branch of humanity needs to flow through us."

"If you're saying to act like less of an old pirate when we meet them, I can do that. But Camina—" he never uses her first name— "why do you assume that what they have to offer is good?"

"I don't. But I think we have more choice about being friendly to them than we do about winning a fight with them.

"Which reminds me, I meant to get a look at their drive signature." She glances at the monitor showing the scopes' view of the presumably-now-moving ship.

The ship does still seem to be moving with fusion engines, or something resembling them; whatever the twitch-trick it was doing was, it isn't doing now. Still, it's accelerating at twenty-five Gs. Humans have survived that, humans have survived twice that for brief periods, but no one sane would regularly travel at those speeds unless they wanted a crew with crippling health problems.

Meanwhile, pacing calmly on the bridge of a ship that (to her eyes) is unmoving around her, ship operating on low power and minimum acceleration, Jinye Attani Cocoon addresses her crew.

"Officers of the Empire, let me survey the situation. We are trapped in an alien universe, in which we are the only Attani - the only representatives of Imperial culture, the only members of our species -" (the colloquial misstatement - Attani are not a distinct species from humanity, no matter how much they might call themselves homo sapiens attani, irks her, but she doesn't let it show on her face) "- and our first mission is to find a way home. Our second mission, should this fail, is to do our best to bring the Attani Empire here. To build it, as best we can, with the people we meet."

She turns to pace. "You are the best of the Empire." You are time-servers who were cleared for important information purely because it was believed you'd keep your mouth shut and report upwards to higher authority instead of spilling, if questioned. "You are the best of the universe." Excepting of course that there are ordinary humans as smart as Janos von Neumann, or the name-dead heroes who built Central Computing. "You have survived the imperial academies, and flourished, and triumphed! You have survived the imperial service, and flourished, and triumphed!" This should not be a hard bar to pass! "In this mission, we have two weapons. We have you yourself and through your works - and the ship that you and yours - Veninheim and Suiyan, Guival and Centaurus - built and have captained, the technologies you and yours have discovered, the strategies you and yours have devised." Mostly yours. Not you, in particular.

"And we have them. I don't want you thinking that we have their weaknesses, though we do. We have the fact that they are, by and large, not that smart, not that strong, can barely see, can hardly withstand acceleration, and need twice as much sleep as any of you." And there are several orders of magnitude more.

"No, we have their strengths. Their ambition. Their intelligence. Their desire to strive. All these things will make them want to live up to the standards of the Attani, and the best of them? Will succeed. They will join us, and they will make our empire greater and stronger than it has ever been before. Our ancestors made the Attani Empire out of humanity. We can do the same. When you look at the men and women of Earth and Mars, I want you to see in each of them what I do - an Attani-to-be, and father and mother of Attani-to-be. They are not our enemies. They are our brothers." She smiled. "They just don't know it yet." Fortunately.

She nods.

"The Empire is born from our strengths, and triumphs through our devotion. If the Attani Empire was not superior, it would not be great. All that we need, we can accomplish."

She hesitates a moment.

"Now. We're going to have some unusual problems to solve, if we're going to achieve either victory condition. Let me discuss our plans..."

Drummer notes their extreme acceleration, but doesn't say anything about it. Inertial dampening is one of the known abilities of the protomolecule, so if this is a human civilization that developed Gates on their own rather than having it dropped on them, it's reasonable they've figured that out as well. She won't ask them about it immediately; she doesn't intend to seem like she's demanding anything too valuable of them unearned.

While she waits for them to get in range, she sends Fred a longer update on the situation. It still hasn't been long enough for any of his replies to have reached her yet.

When they come within 0.25 light-seconds of Medina Station—it only takes about 45 minutes—she tightbeams them a short message. It's source code for their video messaging protocols, translated into the oldest programming language the station's computer knows. Hopefully this alternate civilization's point of divergence isn't before—1972, the computer informs her helpfully—and they're at least as bad as her own in terms of still having dependencies on centuries-old software.

(Or, though she doesn't know it, they have an AGI that can figure these things out.)

Assuming they manage to run the program, she opens a video link. She's a stern woman in her mid-30s with her hair pulled tightly back. Beside her is an older man with white hair a face scarred on one side as though from severe burns.

"The OPA extends its greetings, Jinye Attani Attani." She doesn't exactly speak for them but someone has to right now. "This is my executive officer, Klaes Ashford." Also not technically true, he resigned a month ago to head the OPA's new anti-piracy effort, but she hasn't replaced him yet.

"I suppose we should start with—how did you get here, and have you tried to return home? If it's possible to open direct communications between our respective commanding officers we should probably do that."

As it happens, the Attani Empire does not have dependencies on centuries-old software! One of the advantages of an AI-backed autocracy is its ability to handle difficult coordination problems via bulldozer. It does, however, have preexisting software for handling that, because not all of its neighbors have its enthusiasm about bulldozers.

When Drummer opens the video link, she sees the picture of a tall, lanky teenager - or maybe woman in her early twenties - who is either an alien with a very low SFX budget, or an ethnicity unknown to earth, her eyes are large and oddly focused with unusually-large pupils, her skull is slightly oversized for her body, her ears oddly tapered, her skin looking almost elastic, with long black hair. She is obviously in amazing physical shape - the sort that belters have trouble ever getting to, and inners manage only with extensive gym hours - and could pass for an ordinary person with makeup and contact lenses, but is not really trying to. She's wearing a deep blue military uniform with white and red piping and unrecognizable insignia. She's on the bridge of a ship of some sort; they can't tell what most of the instruments do, but they can see that there's several dozen other people on the ship of about the same ethnicity, but if anything more - the same differences she has from inners, exaggerated; stranger skin textures and hair tones, odd ear and nose shapes, all implausibly fit. Jinye, in the chair, has long hair, all the others have theirs cut military-short.

"The Attani Empire returns them, Commander Camina Drummer, Klaes Ashford.

"We passed through an ordinary wormhole, and found ourselves in this unknown space instead of in the destination system, a hitherto unrecorded event. We have not yet tried reversing it, but our sensors are clear that the system behind us was not the one we departed from. I would be happy to speak with your commanding officer, but mine is at least temporarily out of reach." Fortunately.

She doesn't comment on Jinye's appearance. Lots of people in the Belt go for weird body mods, and human genetic engineering is illegal on Earth but an alternate-universe version of humanity might have decided differently.

"One thing you should be aware of, to begin with," she says, "is that the Ring system is not our creation. It was built by a now-extinct alien civilization, by our best estimates about two billion years ago; the gate connecting Earth to it was built recently, by a—piece of alien technology that we accidentally discovered and activated inside one of Saturn's moons. We do not understand the principles behind it, and our gates...have had incidents where the ships transiting did not arrive at their intended destinations. So far we have not reestablished contact with any of them, so we don't know where they went; I assume, since our universe seems unfamiliar to you, that they did not arrive in yours?" It's a stretch but she has to hope they're still alive somewhere, if the possibility is there at all.

"If your civilization has developed wormhole technology on its own we would greatly appreciate an exchange of scientific knowledge. You should consult with our scientists regarding what we do know about the gates." She wishes Naomi were here. She saw a report that they were headed back from Ilus; she should probably tightbeam the Roci, as annoying as it is to have Holden embedded in every single international incident.

"My commanding officer is on the other side of the solar system, but I'm sending him regular updates. We can certainly arrange a meeting.

"If there are higher priorities I'm not thinking of feel free to raise them now, but I would at some point like to get a sense of what history we do and don't share. Did you have, for example...World War II?"

Holy shit are you people completely insane ACTIVATED ALIEN TECHNOLOGY is your entire alternate universe OUT OF ITS COLLECTIVE MIND

(None of this shows on Jinye's face. It is almost certainly not Drummer's fault.)

"I know of no travelers from alternate dimensions arriving in ours, but it is not certain I would; the vast majority of our galaxy, even of the habitable worlds in our galaxy, is unexplored." The Attani aren't the only empire out there. "We have independently derived wormhole technology, though not on this ship," a wormhole tunneler is about twice the mass and more than ten times the cost of an escort frigate, "and would be pleased to sell or trade nonmilitary technology for the mutual benefit of humanity."

She pauses. "The presence of aliens, even extinct aliens, is a significant departure from what we've encountered." Single-celled life forms, yes, occasionally, she thinks someone may have found alien algae, but nothing past that. "Information about them would be extremely important; active aliens, here or elsewhere, would be a potentially catastrophic threat to humanity." The Attani had a mere few hundred years' technological lead on Tsirona; a million years lead would mean that they were, so far as the aliens were concerned, algae.

"As for history... key dates in our history would be the First World War, 1914-1918 AD by the Terran calendar, the Second World War, traditionally, 1937-1945, the birth of the internet, usually dated to 1983, the development of practically reversible cryogenic freezing, in 2025, and the start of the third World War, normally dated to 2056. Which of these sound familiar to you?"

"The first two World Wars, yes. The Internet I'm not personally sure but that sounds approximately correct. Reversible cryogenic freezing of humans exists but I think it was after 2025 and I wouldn't call it a key date in our history." (It's nowhere near reliable enough for interstellar travel, hence the former generation ship she now commands. The few frozen cancer patients that were revived once they had reliable drugs for that suffered from various mental health problems and mostly died of unrelated causes within a few years anyway.)

"There was a world war in 2056. It nearly went nuclear but a ceasefire was negotiated barely in time, as I recall. The settlements that ended it eventually led to the establishment of Earth's current government. Continuous human presence on Mars from 2042, Ep—uh, cheap fusion drives from around 2150, Martian independence of Earth in 2156. Settlement of the outer planets mostly started after that. Current year is 2352.

"The discovery of the protomolecule—that's the alien technology—was something of an unlikely coincidence, I think. Does Saturn have a moon called Phoebe in your timeline? It's a captured extrasolar object; that's where the protomolecule was found. It did, briefly, present a catastrophic threat to humanity, but that was averted. It's quite a long story.

"...additional threat vectors from the same source are, on reflection, probably understudied. If you'd prefer not to be in this mysterious alien pocket dimension any longer than necessary, our solar system is through Ring #0—uh, I'll send you a map—but I think that we would benefit, at this point, from you coming to the station and being able to interact face to face. I think we're all reasonably confident at this point that we don't mean to kill each other."

Jinye does not understand why people want to interact face to face so much??? Jinye always feels most comfortable having a computer running six different espionage/analysis programs between her and anyone she's talking to. "We do have that moon; if we ever get back, I'll make sure to let everyone know to be careful with it." She wants to hear that long story, at some point.

"I think I'd like to stay in real-time communication with my crew until we've finished our scans," she says, "particularly of the alien artifacts, but if you wouldn't mind taking a few technical experts I'm sure they'd be fascinated to see your station."

Yeah, Jinye is not confident that six battleships aren't going to come out of Ring #0 (whichever one that really is) at top speeds, weapons blaring, disable the Cor Leonis, and then seize everyone on the ship for interrogation and dissection. She does, however, think that risking a couple of junior techs is worth it to get a closer look at the alternate-timeline technology.

She's also going to want to pick up anything she can from Medina Station's internet.

Drummer realizes that Jinye is probably afraid of being taken hostage or something, and isn't at all offended by that, even though she absolutely did not intend to take anyone hostage! She knows what politics are like, and it's not as though being from an alternate universe is likely to make trust issues better. She hopes her attempts to establish cooperation are reciprocated someday, though.

She'll be happy to take a few Attani techs and put them in contact with the OPA's own engineers. Who are about 50% Naomi by usefulness, but Naomi will be back in a few days.

No ships are going to come through the gate at top speed and seize everyone! Earth or Mars might do that, if they knew the Attani were there, but they don't, and there's only three ships stationed at the ring anyway. The rest are multiple days of travel away, because these humans will be turned into jello if they try to maintain the acceleration that the Attani do. No one would dissect anyone at all, even if it weren't a war crime there'd be no reason to.

Medina Station's mirror of the Internet is small but it should be enough to get up to speed on anything happening in the system; what do Jinye (and/or Ting) want to know about, based on their conversations with Drummer and the news broadcasts they picked up?

Wikipedia. They want Wikipedia. Also a list of the most popular news stories of the past five years, official information on fleet sizes and ship sizes within fleets, what kind of acceleration they were supposed to pretend to have not to stand out too much, and explanations of how local computers work so they can take them over if they need to, but most of that stuff is going to be on Wikipedia.

The practical teams studying the topic are focused on:

- Reconstructing capabilities of fleet compositions, fleet strategies, and ship designs from publicly-available information.

- The HELL is up with all this alien technology nonsense, how did humanity survive it.

- Who are the main political players in all the factions, are there just three factions or are there, like, nine hundred, and what are the subfactions looking like.

- So there's Gates to, like, a billion worlds? What's up with that. How many of them have we just settled. Can we have one. Or two. Or sixteen.

And they'll send a shuttle over with two of the most enthusiastic-about-being-trapped-in-the-past techs they've got, given lightning guns instead of hand needlers. They give mannequins lightning guns, even if the locals get ahold of them there won't be any kind of crisis.

And while they're doing this, Jinye is going to keep talking to Drummer! "So, can I ask you to give me a quick survey of the situation as you see it? I'd like to get some idea of exactly where we've landed, and just what the short version of that long story you mentioned looks like."

Oh wow she is probably not actually qualified to present a more-advanced civilization with the case for why they should ally with the Belt instead of Earth or Mars, which is presumably what she's tasked to do in this situation? Belters definitely have lots of objective advantages over Inners but they're subtle, sometimes, and she's acutely aware that the Attani have probably taken one look at Medina Station and drawn reasonably accurate conclusions about the Belt's military capabilities.

She starts with the question that's actually, somehow, easier, all things considered. "A couple of years ago researchers on Phoebe found the protomolecule." She sends across a picture. "Some sort of nanotech. It—eats—living things, and the more it eats, the smarter it gets, and the smarter the things it eats, the smarter it gets. Some rich and powerful Earthers thought they could control it and were rich enough to bribe high-level people in the UN to look the other way while they did horribly unethical medical experiments.

"They infected the entire population of Eros Station in what I can only assume was a deliberate attempt to make it smarter. This definitely worked. The asteroid started moving under its own power and accelerating at 20g straight for Earth.

"So, yeah. The UN was about to nuke the shit out of it when—don't ask me how—" there are theories but they're way too ridiculous to tell the Attani "—it changed its mind and decided to hit Venus instead. Eventually it finished what it was building, which flew way out into the outer solar system and built the Ring. A wormhole into this space, which has all sorts of weird properties—at one point when we were exploring, we spooked it—no, I don't know what 'it' precisely is—and it decided to make it so that nothing with mass in here could move faster than 30 meters per second. I say that just to give you an idea of the power level we're dealing with here.

"Anyway, we managed to get it to calm down and not destroy the solar system, and then it opened up all these other gates. About 1300 of them, I think. About two-thirds have habitable planets, and the other third are some kind of stellar remnant, which suggests they used to be habitable and then died out. A few have human colonies but we haven't been at it very long. If you wanted to claim one of your own the OPA wouldn't stop you but Earth or Mars might try. One of my close friends was part of a recent peacekeeping mission to one of the new colonies, trying to mediate between the Belters who got there first and the Earth corporation who lay formal claim to it afterwards. I hear they got into a lot of weird alien shit in the process, though, so do that at your own risk.

"They'll be back in a few days and we can ask them. The UN's censored most of the news about the weird alien shit, because Earth is massively overpopulated and they don't want to make people scared to leave, I guess."

Information from Wikipedia not covered by Drummer:

Public information about fleet designs. Most civilian ships cruse at 0.3g; military ships in a hurry will sustain 2 or 3 and regularly get above 10 in maneuvers, but for the latter the crew are strapped to specially designed couches with intravenous drugs to help their bodies deal with the strain. Belters and some Martians mostly can't even survive Earth gravity for long periods, but Martian soldiers, at least, train in higher gravity to be prepared for a possible invasion of Earth.

Earth (the UN), Mars, and the OPA are the only major factions. Earth and Mars are democracies with all the bullshit that usually entails. The current Secretary-General of the UN just lost an election to a candidate whose main differentiating position was being even less careful about the alien shit. The OPA has a million subfactions but at least some of them are basically just gangs of pirates trying to capitalize on the general amnesty issued the OPA on various charges of terrorism that are now recognized as part of a righteous struggle for independence. For some incredibly bizarre reason, the overall head of the OPA, Fred Johnson, is an exiled war criminal from Earth whose most famous action in the UN Marine Corps was massacring a bunch of Belter civilians. Klaes Ashford, Drummer's XO, was once the most infamous pirate in the system and now heads the OPA's anti-piracy fleet. (At least Drummer herself doesn't seem to have such an incredibly dubious past.)

There's also the crew of the Rocinante, a mixed-origin group of former ice haulers now crewing a stolen legitimately salvaged Martian gunship as basically mercenaries, but, like, not for the money, for the good of all mankind or some incredibly improbable bullshit. They seem to be mixed up in at least half of the major international incidents of the past three years, including what appears to be the peacekeeping mission Drummer mentioned.

Rocinante: Hey, Jinye's working for the good of all mankind! It's not that improbable! She's just working for it via trying to make sure it gets the best leadership it possibly can, like, say, her.

Protomolecule: AAAAAAAAH!!!!! She will try not to scream too visibly! This is exactly the sort of situation where Ting would step in before it got this bad to prevent the annihilation of all life, not that he would need to because the Emperor is a horrible person but very very good at his job! AAAAAH! Every aspects of this except how there are people left is exactly how she would expect things to go if humanity started messing with alien artifacts! She is never trusting any Earther ever they are complete lunatics AAAAAH!

AAAAAH!

... Okay, screaming silently inside her own head does not actually help. "Thirteen hundred gates," she says, carefully-managed awe in her voice. And one chokepoint that every ship traveling to or from over eight hundred planets passes through. And their defenses consist of Medina Station. She is so incredibly tempted to declare she's siding with the OPA, just because they need her the most, but since she can't extract any pay in advance and the UN probably has battleships that could shoot down the Cor Leonis, she isn't going to try to, but the current state of the universe is one where exactly one faction is about to dominate all of human space - or at least thirteen hundred gates' worth - and nobody is going to be able to do anything without it until the dominant faction gets unbearably stupid.

(This could still happen, but given how little space wormhole physics textbooks take up, if Mars takes the station over, she can sell Earth what they need to build a wormhole tunneler, and vice versa.)

"Thank you for that update. I owe you a favor, Commander Drummer." She very much appreciates it. She should probably drop to four or five Gs of acceleration where people can see her. "This would be the kind of weird alien shit where they declare nothing can move faster than thirty meters per second?" In whatever arbitrary frame of reference they happen to be using.

The Attani reading this are going to sort of stare at the idea of a world where military ships in a hurry sustain three gravities. I mean, yes, if you're on a pre-artificial-gravity ship you use crash couches, that's common sense, but...

They are also going to try to read everything they can get about key leading figures on Earth and on Mars, and to try and learn what the main factions are and the main differences between the factions are, with an eye towards learning who they should talk to.

(Also, seriously, what's up with Fred Johnson?)

"If the message I got from Naomi a few days ago is anything to go by, this was the sort of weird alien shit where they accidentally re-activated a billion-year-old fusion reactor several kilometers across, which then exploded, if you're trying to get a finger on the x-risk here. That's to say nothing of all the even weirder alien shit around how they managed to stop this from being worse, like, for example, the ghost that lives in James Holden's head."

A lot of Belters don't trust Fred Johnson, only partly on account of the whole murder thing! "Head of the OPA" is a pretty nebulous position, he doesn't have much power without the consent of a pretty large majority-by-strength of the various subfactions. But he was arguably baited into his original crime (his superiors never told him the station he destroyed had surrendered), genuinely remorseful about it, and joined the Belt's cause with resources only an Earther could provide, as the longtime head of operations for the largest manufacturing corporation in the system.

The other person you could arguably call the head of the OPA is Anderson Dawes, born dirt-poor on Ceres, whose parents had once worked for the same company whose striking workers Fred Johnson later killed. He is largely responsible for recruiting Fred Johnson into the organization, a gesture some might interpret as forgiveness.

(The ghost that lives in Jinye Attani Cocoon's head grins at her while organizing helpful charts in the corners of her vision.)

"... Count me impressed that humans still exist in this timeline," says Jinye drily. "Do you know if this is typical of colonies, or if this is just typical of James Holden?"

Pause.

"... Ghost?"

"I would not be surprised if the other colonies have buried problems of similar magnitude, but to my knowledge they have remained buried. It is mostly just typical of James Holden to go digging them up, although, to his credit, he doesn't seem to be doing so intentionally.

"My understanding is that it's the protomolecule, talking in his head using the image and neurally-scanned personality of a guy it ate on Eros. But you're really going to have to ask him about that part."

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, Ting, I know, Ting, "murder and dissect James Holden" is now on my to-do-list, Ting, you don't need to tell me!

"So, these... alien nanomachines. That built the Gates. Are they not doing anything now... because they accomplished all their goals and are now dormant? Or because the rest were contained? Or is there something important going on with them that I'm missing? I rather feel that, important as politics is, existential threats to humanity might be slightly more so."

"Small samples of the protomolecule contained without anything to feed on appear to be dormant. I'm probably allowed to tell you that several such samples exist but anything beyond that is classified information.

"I should also remind you that the civilization that created the protomolecule, powerful as it was, is itself extinct, and we have no idea why. Those of us worried about the extinction of humanity are mostly worried about whatever did that.

"On the other hand, I'm not really the one most qualified to answer any of these questions."

"Understood." The easiest explanation for what happened to them is that they blew themselves up, see the kind of random tech they're throwing around, but while that would be nice to believe she doesn't actually believe it.

She pauses. "In that case, once our tech team gets back, I think we may want to pay a visit to Sol. Asking frankly, if James Holden isn't in the system, what do you think our odds of not getting shot on sight are?"

"You'll be target-locked, and probably boarded, on sight if any Earth or Mars ship gets a close enough look at you to figure out there's something weird going on, but you won't get shot. Speaking of which, I'll make sure to send your tech team back with a proper set of transponder codes so you don't look like pirates, and instructions on how to disguise your drive signature so you don't stand out from a billion kilometers away. It will probably make your engines less efficient, but if you go rocketing across the system at 20g with whatever inertial dampening tech you have you're going to attract a whole lot of attention anyway.

"The person I do think would be most qualified to talk about protomolecule-related things with you, if that's what you want to do, would be Naomi Nagata, who is not currently in the system but will be passing through here in about 3 days. She's a very old friend of mine, probably the smartest person I know, and I trust her greatly. Unfortunately, you may not be inclined to, since she's now part of James Holden's crew." And dating him, but no need to make Jinye scream too much all at once.

"I greatly appreciate your advice on how not to look like an alien menace," Jinye says. (In fact, twenty gs was chosen to be plausible not to be inertial damping, just crash couches and good drugs and lots and lots of genetic engineering. Unfortunately...) "I have nothing against crew members of James Holden's -" from a distance, at least, or if sterilized in plasma "- but I think we'd rather not wait three days, if possible, since I'd rather not ride into Sol on a wave of superstitious rumors about my coming. Unfortunately, being boarded seems... less than ideal." She is going to sell her people's advanced technology, not give it away. "I'm not sure what the best way to resolve this difficulty is."

"If you're asking for me to give you OPA military transponder codes or something, I'm not going to do that, and it's not as though it would make you less likely to attract the attention of the Inners, peace treaty or not." The obvious reaction of either Earth or Mars to a ship like Jinye's with OPA codes is that the other one has advanced tech they're lending to black ops assets in the Belt. "To be quite honest, if you can pull 20 g's sustained, it's not as though they could catch you to board you." Well, not quite, missiles can pull a thousand, briefly, but they'd have to be really incredibly stupid to end up within hammer-lock range of an Inner ship by accident, and they are clearly not stupid.

"I'm not asking for transponder codes; just that I don't know the situation here, and I was wondering if you have any suggestions for how to come in like the representative of a foreign power, instead of like a scavenger who just picked up an alien ship she can't expect to keep."

Without starting a war, that is.

"The main problem here is that if either Earth or Mars come across technology, especially military technology, they haven't seen before, they're likely to assume that the other one developed it and is planning to use it against them, and are unlikely to be persuaded otherwise, especially if the true explanation is really incredibly implausible. The events of the past few years have hopefully done something to beat this habit out of them but I would not stake too much on assuming it's done enough.

"My impression, beyond that, is that you have at least as much experience being a representative of a foreign power as I. The obvious answer, however, is: represent power. Which, in your position, I would probably do by implying as strongly as I could get away with that I was in contact with my high command and they had a thousand more ships like mine ready to come through the gate at any minute."

The problem with that lie is that it's a fragile lie; easy to test and hence easy to destroy. And lying gets you a reputation as a liar, and she'd rather not burn her reputation just yet. "I appreciate your advice, Commander."

The two techs are super excited about this. They got assigned to a basically boring ship because they were good at not doing stupid stuff but not (by Attani standards) all that good at anything else, and now they get to take a look at tech from a completely foreign development tree, and see all the awesome developments they made.

They are absurdly genetically engineered, to the point where they don't really seem to worry about acceleration or deceleration of just a couple Gs, intensely muscular, visibly not quite human, and have flat orange and green hair. They are showing up in uniforms that, to the close eye, are made out of some implausibly-tough bulletproof weave, they have nonlethal weapons (apparently named "lightning guns") holstered and are perfectly willing to leave them in the ship but don't find the question very interesting, and they are fascinated by Medina Station. Look at all the compromises! Look at all the places where someone, instead of just using basic standard building materials, came up with an ingenious solution! Look! They have railguns for ship defense! (This spoken with a similar intonation to that of a medievalist who happens to encounter professional longbowmen after the invention of the Kalashnikov.) They are very, very impressed at how the Belters ingeniously managed to solve all these engineering problems, including the ones that no recorded society has ever encountered because no recorded society has ever lived in space without some form of synthetic gravity before! It is so fascinating! They take advice from the Belter engineers about how to not look too dangerous without too much incredulousness, and are overall really very grateful to them for improving their knowledge.

The Belters try not to stare too much at the Attani. They're not thinking at all about how to steal their valuable DNA, like the Attani are worried about, because genetic engineering of humans is just not done, but they are super curious (though mostly dare not ask) about what body mods they're using. (Body mods are legal because they're something you do to yourself; genetic engineering is something you do to another person.) Some of them are aware that the Attani are looking at them with the anthropological curiosity of a culture that thinks of itself as far superior, but they get that from Earthers all the time; they're used to it.

They get the Attani up to speed on basic communication protocols and how to disguise their drive signature—though this will be basically impossible if they're not using some variant on deuterium/tritium or deuterium/helium-3 fusion—and send them on their way with a standards-compliant civilian transponder module.

The Attani aren't using body mods! They received the standard Attani enhancement packages prior to conception. They will refrain from audibly going "oh those poor people were treated so badly by their culture" when it becomes clear that genetic engineering of humans is just not done, but, uh, they're clearly thinking it.

The Attani thank them for their help, make quiet, careful surveys of the systems, and return to the ship, buzzing with excitement about the primitives and their brilliantly primitive tech.

(Look, they were the least xenophobic people I could find with the required technical knowledge, OK? Doing my best here.)

When the techs are back on board the Cor Leonis, Drummer messages them.

"I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but the most difficult part of getting across the system undetected will be just getting out of the Ring. The area just on the other side is pretty heavily patrolled. I can file a flight plan for you that would look fully legit in the computers, but it will not hold up to visual inspection of your obviously not civilian ship, so my recommendation would be to stay as far away from any naval ships you encounter as you can without looking like you're running away. If you keep your drive pointed toward them this will blind their scopes but it may be suspicious in its own right, if you're accelerating in a direction that makes no sense by your flight plan."

As soon as she drops comms, Ashford speaks.

"We got a hit. While you were talking to the aliens.

"We know where Marco is."

"Have we learned our lesson about this from the last two times?"

"I'm going to get him myself."

Slowly, the beginnings of a plan are forming in Drummer's mind. It's not a very good plan, yet, but it might be crazy enough to work.

"Take our alien friends with you. You might need the firepower."

"Even if that were a good idea, do you think they'll go for it?"

"Only one way to find out."