DATE: Year 487-A, Day 3

  LOCATION: Arrokoth (Kuiper Belt)

  The Saganite exodus to the Oort Cloud had been fraught with difficulty, and hundreds of settlers and their equipment disembarked far earlier, spreading through that region of the Oort Cloud.

  After the Nemesis expedition arrived at its destination, nearly a light year away, work on a faster-than-light zipline began first in the direction back, before the more massive undertaking of tearing a short cut to Alpha Centauri, or, for that matter, wherever the astro metrics specialists decided was most promising. The work on the zipline back to the solar system from the Oort Cloud, then, gave the scientists time to survey potential extrasolar plants to settle, while the engineers figured out how to put the theory behind zipline tech into practice.

  In essence, a first ship makes the voyage along the path of the zipline in a sublight speed. There’s a lower limit of speed at which it doesn’t work, but it’s not very high. As the first ship makes the voyage, it pulls the spacetime foam attached to the zipline base at the starting point, cutting a line through the foam until it gets to the destination, where it deploys a second zipline base to attach this line of foam to.

  The zipline back to the solar system, and to the Kuiper belt specifically, was a lot more successful than the one to the star the Saganites decided to embark to. It took multiple zipline base designs to even get to a launch phase, and the first generational ship had failed, losing contact some seven years into its voyage. A second generational ship was still on its way. The scientists weren’t sure the zipline would hold.

  Despite the zipline, there was a lot more contact between the Saganite remnants on Jupiter and those in the Kuiper belt than between either of those and the Saganites around Nemesis in the Oort Cloud, and generally contact between the Nemesis Saganites and the remnant went exclusively through a transmission station on the small snowman-shaped asteroid Arrokoth, which was monitored further along by the Saganites on Pluto, who had settled into the ruins of the Pluto Underground Cities, whose original human population died off some three hundred years after the Rip. That they held on that long had become a kind of myth, too, about human resilience across the solar system.

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  Ganna Grover arrived at the transmission station on Arrokoth because none of the Saganites were confident in their ability to bring any of the ships in the Kuiper fleet up to condition to take the zipline to Nemesis. It was a sorry situation. The Nemesis Saganites ran a ship intermittently once every few years, for visitors between the two. It was mostly used by Nemesis scientists visiting further into the solar system. No one from Nemesis particularly stayed in the Kuiper Belt, and the ship rarely brought any Kuiper Belt Saganites back with it.

  The shipyard on Makemake, brought into a synchronous but still distant orbit from Pluto, had started working fervently to get a ship ready for the zipline, mindful a window for a potential Nemesis arrival meant sending a ship was prohibited. The Nemesis Saganites had stopped sending the schedule of their arrival because of the growing technological gap between the two, but the Kuiper belt Saganites knew when they were prohibited from using the zipline, though they hadn’t sent a ship in forty years.

  It took the table chiefs nearly a day to reach the conclusion that a transmission from Arrokoth, while it would take a year and a half to arrive at Nemesis, might still be the fastest way to get a message to the Saganites there about what had happened on Europa.

  Ganna was told to stay on Arrokoth after she was done. The transmission was unmanned. The receiver for transmissions from Pluto had broken a long time ago, and all it could do in its last years is send back a limited set of space weather data it had collected.

  So she was needed to manually input the message about the return of the Europa aliens. The explosion at the Hotel Florida wouldn’t have concerned the Nemesis Saganites at all. Even the ones on Jupiter had already outsourced the investigation to the JLF security forces, far more concerned with the spectacle of the dragons that they couldn’t publicly explain.