DATE: Year 487-A, Sol 10

  LOCATION: Arrokoth (Kuiper Belt)

  Ganna Grove had been at the transmission station for a week. She’d rather enjoyed the quiet. For a dying species, humans still packed themselves in tightly, Grove thought.

  She’d spent a few days scanning the skies for an egg-shaped asteroid. Space dragons, her parents had told her about. She’d always thought it was a tall tale her parents told her, until the sightings of the dragons at the Hotel Florida.

  More of the Kuiper Belt Saganites knew about the Europa aliens than did on Jupiter, since they were more isolated and it mattered less. So the dragons were never confusing, it was understood they were psychic projections. Only their purpose was confusing.

  Grove thought she knew what the dragons meant. That they were coming back, out here in the Kuiper Belt. When she got old enough to question her parents’ space dragon story she’d asked why they didn’t tell anyone. Because they wouldn’t believe us, they responded, and she mostly knew they were kidding, but not quite.

  Grove’s parents told her they’d found an egg-shaped asteroid while doing a regular periodic survey of the region around Arrokoth. The surface was abnormally smooth, and that interested the scientists inside the Groves, so they devised a way to tow it back to Arrokoth for closer study. Their vessel, they told Ganna when she was little, was intercepted by a dragon, that breathed a plasma that cut right through the tow connecting their vessel to the egg shaped asteroid, then knocked it with its tail into a pouch on its front.

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  A totally unbelievable story. And yet. Now there were dragons on Europa. She wanted to find another egg-shaped asteroid.

  She figured out she’d been asked to stay on Arrokoth in case of an additional transmission, and that’s what happened. A lot had transpired since she first arrived.

  The Kuiper Belt Saganites now had a message to send to Nemesis directly from the Sagan City. An alien had arrived there, and he had some interesting things to say.

  They’d demanded Europa for themselves, accusing the JLF of encroaching on the side of the moon they inhabited. But that wasn’t the primary reason they’d appeared.

  The dragon apparitions were from a splinter faction of the Europa aliens, who had gone travelling across the solar system on a comet that had taken them all the way out to the Oort cloud.

  They’d returned several months ago and began the process of reporting everything they’d been able to study, about themselves and their surroundings. The Europa aliens didn’t like the conclusions the travelers had come to. The conclusion that the entire race ought to start expanding in the solar system seemed to the Europa aliens a foregone conclusion for the travelers. It’s why they went, after all.

  The solar system, they always knew, was, like the surface of Europa or the clouds of Jupiter, full of science but mostly empty.

  The returning travelers disagreed.

  They disagreed to, with the long-standing policy of the Europa aliens and the Saganites to keep interspecies contact to a minimum and to conceal the existence of aliens in the general population of each species.

  The travelers had gone to the ends of the solar system, they said. And what they’d seen and contemplated convinced them they and the humans had to cooperate.

  The solar system wasn’t isolated. They had been to its edge.

  And there they’d seen dragons.

  Ganna’s parent’s dragons.

  So now she had to send a new message to Nemesis.