Galactic Neighbor

I still remember that school trip to this day. It was almost painfully hot, the sun burning on the weathered stone floor. Tufts of grass were asserting themselves between the flagstones. None of us paid attention to the old signboard and its sun-bleached map, still explaining the locations of now-decommissioned launch pads.
My eyes just about made it over the railing of the observation platform, bare iron too hot to touch. I looked out over the calm ocean bay towards the thin black line stretching up towards the sky. That line was what they'd taken us there to see, the world's first launch loop that had just been inaugurated a few weeks before, not too far from my hometown on an island out in the middle of nowhere. Tether lines kept the loop in position as the active structure pushed itself upwards.
Most of my classmates didn't care much. Unlike me, who had just moved there two months before, they'd grown up on the island back when they were still using it as a rocket launch site, so they were all used to the far flashier rocket launches. The sleek white delta-wing spaceplane slowly and silently sliding up the structure would've seemed boring in comparison. The launch loop was holding itself aloft almost magically. I was enthralled by the idea of going to space, of seeing something go into space in person.
"That's my stuff on there," I heard someone next to me say. I looked up to see a tall man with a graying beard next to me. He leaned on the railing casually, the long sleeves of his dark, sturdy clothes protecting him from the hot metal. He was gazing out towards the loop, a grin on his face. "They're building a big new spaceship up there," he continued. "It's going to be the fastest there's ever been."
"You're a rocket scientist?" I asked with childish curiosity.
He had my full attention as he turned towards me with that same grin. "More or less. Imagine what we can do once we can travel among the stars! We'll finally grow up and join the galactic neighborhood! How amazing it'll be to live on an earth along people from other worlds!"
I only learned his name a few years later, when we discussed the invention of the c+ warp drive in high school science class. There he was, giving a press conference on that very same observation deck in a newspaper clipping: Dr. Artur Chernyak, physicist, inventor of faster-than-light travel. That spaceship he'd been talking about back then was none other than the Einstein, humanity's first experimental faster-than-light ship.
Sadly, Dr. Chernyak never got to see his dream of humanity joining an interstellar community come true. The first prototypes weren't anywere near reliable enough for an interstellar trip, and he died a few years later, just months before the first interstellar starship returned from Proxima Centauri around the time I graduated from university. Even if he'd lived a bit longer, that ship did not find the bustling galactic neighborhood he had hoped for.
But he'd left a lasting impact on the entire world, and his words on that hot summer day left a lasting impact on me. Humanity did not give up on the stars from that one disappointment, and neither did I, and so I found myself ten years later as a crew member on the fourth journey to the stars. Mission specialist Sagan P. Barnard, SETI officer of the Discovery.

***

The mission planners hadn't thought it likely that we'd run into any high-tech civilization, that much was obvious, not just based on the SETI systems—really just a set of high-end software-defined radio transceivers—being left off the pre-arrival checklists. I was going through the checks anyway, given I didn't really have any other responsibilities while the rest of the crew was going over all the other science equipment.
The computer systems for those transceivers were in equipment drawers at the back of some maintenance corridor, close to where the antennas were on the hull of the ship and some emergency parts storage but pretty much nothing else. It was a narrow crawlspace stuffed full of supplies in custom-made numbered cloth containers and wall panels with cryptic acronyms and warning symbols. I actually quite liked that place, not least since it was one of a small handful of places on the cramped starship where you could be alone for a bit. At least it used to be. At some point, Ariane found me there and decided I needed company. How she managed to arrange her shifts to reliably be able to bother me, I never to figured out.
Ariane Alvarez was one of the engineers tasked with keeping the c+ drive running smoothly. They said that the issue that caused one of the early uncrewed test probes to be spread halfway across the solar system couldn't happen anymore on the new models, but I for one was glad that we had someone to make sure. Ariane was every stereotype of an engineer, dark hair cropped short (as most people tended to prefer in the ship's microgravity) and a tendency to wear the upper half of her uniform coveralls wrapped around her waist and float around in just the thermal underlayer. If any part of the ship's main machinery had involved moving parts, she'd probably have had grease stains on her face.
"Need any help with the alien-phone?" she said through the gaps between the modules in the equipment rack, as if summoned by my thoughts of her. I flinched, sending me drifting back a bit before I could grab on to a wall-mounted handhold.
"It's not an alien-phone, and keeping it working without your help is my job," I replied, a bit more aggressively than I'd intended to. "Don't you have your own checks to run for the drive? To make sure the shutdown doesn't vaporize us?"
Ariane grinned in response. "They don't do that anymore, you know. This baby runs a gen-4 drive, worst that can happen is a bit of extreme instantaneous deceleration to turn you to mush. Anyway, I did actually come for a reason this time. I had a hunch you'd lose track of time again and be late to the pre-arrival briefing."
I looked at the clock display on the terminal I'd been using and immediately felt my face getting hot in embarrassment when I realized she was right. Hastily, I packed up my gear and slid the equipment drawer back into the wall before clambering down the corridor after Ariane, using the handholds mounted in every available space.
On the way to the meeting room, we passed the military quarters. I didn't particularly get along with the soldiers, which I suppose was to be expected with my job being the polar opposite of theirs. Most of them seemed to be among the people who believed in what they called the "Dark Forest" hypothesis, that any alien intelligence would be so different from us that the only way to be sure of our survival would be to preemptively eradicate them. Thankfully, the weapons they'd installed on the Discovery definitely wouldn't manage that much, but it still worried me to have these people in charge of them.
From the doorway, one of them—I think it was Lieutenant Hodges—jeered, as they sometimes liked to do, "Hey, Alien Whisperer, did your handler have to get you again?" I didn't respond, I never did, but Ariane couldn't help herself as usual. "Don't you have a missile to polish?" she shot back, garnering laughter and hoots from the rest of the men.
The meeting room was stuffed with people, including along the nominal ceiling. Only the large rectangular table in the middle of the room was left unoccupied, probably purely due to people's reluctance to sit on tables. Even though everyone knew what was going to happen, it still felt like a momentous occasion to finally arrive at their destination. Lalande 21185, red dwarf 8.3 light years from earth. Not a star remarkable for anything but being close, and not promising for encountering any extraterrestrial life with all of its confirmed planets outside the habitable zone.
"All right everyone, I understand we're all excited but please let us get on with the actual briefing," Captain Lehtonen shouted over the hubbub. Lehtonen was ex-military, with the hard face and buzz cut to match, but he seemed more reasonable than the others most of the time. It took almost a minute for everyone to quiet down. Normally I'd have expected him to be a lot angrier and chewed out people, but he seemed to be in a tolerant mood because of the circumstances. "Navigation has set the exact time of deceleration at MET 90:23:47:12. That's thirteen hours from now, so I recommend those of you scheduled for the first arrival shift to get some sleep soon. That includes defense and SETI even though we're not expecting you to have anything to do. Procedures are procedures."
He took a deep breath and held up his tablet. "We'll read through all the standard procedures in preparation, as is standard procedure."

***

I couldn't believe what I was seeing. When I'd taken my seat nestled into the wall of the cramped compartment that counted as a bridge that morning, I'd expected to be staring at a screen of nothing for hours and wander off to sleep for the rest of the trip.
But there it was. The second the Discovery slowed down to sublight speed, the waterfall plots came to life, all across the radio spectrum. Except around the hydrogen line, just as I'd expect from earth.
"Navigation fix acquired, rough position as planned, refining," I heard, muffled by the invisible wall that had appeared around me and the screen displaying incontrovertible evidence of an advanced alien civilization.
"I... I'm sorry," I stammered into the quiet concentration of the bridge, turning heads and inviting a few stifled chuckles. I immediately felt dumb, that I should have double checked and triple checked what I was seeing first. But I'd checked the equipment over and over, there was no way this kind of data would come from a malfunction. In the seconds I took to formulate it was quiet enough to hear a pin drop, if there had been any gravity to cause that drop.
"There seems to be broad-spectrum radio communication activity," I simply said.
All hell broke loose. People talked across the bridge, some demanding to know more, some accusing me of making up things.
"Quiet!" thundered the captain. His tone made it clear enough that he wouldn't be as lenient as at the briefing, and people followed his order immediately. "Thank you. Barnard, elaborate."
"I can't really say much more right now, but there is definite artificial radio activity nearby."
"Chances this is a fluke or an issue with our systems?"
"Basically zero. I checked the transceivers yesterday, and there's a clear gap in the spectrum around the hydrogen line, just like we'd see in signals around earth."
Lehtonen leaned back, as far as that was possible strapped into a bridge seat, and I thought I saw a hint of a grin on his face.
"Alright then," he said, reaching for his tablet and enabling a shipwide broadcast. "Everyone, we have a change of plans. We'll proceed with mission plan contingency procedure D.5: possible detection of intelligent extraterrestrial life."
I couldn't help but start laughing to myself. I'd spent the better part of three months preparing for disappointment, so when it turned out I may just be the person to make the discovery of the century, I really didn't know how to react. People were staring at me, at least the ones who weren't too busy reconfiguring the systems they were responsible for or excitedly chattering, but I didn't care. I just laughed, looking at the beautiful plot of strangers talking in languages no human had ever heard.
Following the mission plan, we powered down any equipment that would render the ship easy to detect, like the radar systems, but apparently that had been too little or too late. An hour later, the mood on the bridge turned again instantly when the external cameras saw the other ship arrive. It came in faster than light, appearing instantly with a brilliant blue spark racing back along the trajectory it had come in on as the light caught up.
It sat at an odd angle to us, having come from somewhere on this system's ecliptic while we'd come from a completely different star system, both ships aligned to their last velocity vectors. We assumed it was a patrol ship on watch and ready to go, and orders of magnitude faster than our ships, to arrive as quickly as it did after we entered the star system. It was also a lot larger than the Discovery, over two hundred meters long, an octagonal main body with the back flaring out elegantly. Unlike the two used by human starships, the alien ship had six warping planes arranged in two groups of three. Our drive experts guessed that they were modulating the power to those six elements for stability at higher speeds instead of finetuning the angle and position like the system humans had used since shortly after the Einstein.
The Captain was not happy. "Barnard, I need you to tell me whether they're going to shoot us or not right this second. And get those radar systems back up, I want to know what we're dealing with."
I felt cold sweat on my forehead. The next thing I'd say might well lead to first contact between humans and aliens ending with a missile. "I..." I started and then paused again. "If they were hostile, we'd probably be dead already. Recommend observation."
I kept glancing at the radio plots while a heated discussion started. The military people were trying to push for a preemptive attack, as I'd feared, but everyone else was vehemently against it. Then I saw the signal. A bright red line, right in the gap that had previously been so conspicuously left open, just as humans had decided over a century ago to do in order to leave space for signals from other civilizations.
"They're talking to us," I said quietly, but everyone was paying attention to other things. "Sir," I said more loudly to get Lehtonen's attention. I got most of the attention in the compartment.
"They have started broadcasting a signal on the hydrogen line frequency, which is considered the prime candidate for contact."

***

I quickly figured out that this initial signal was broadcasting prime numbers. They were using four levels of amplitude to encode the digits, with the carrier wave turning off in between numbers. But that was where I got stuck. There was no way they'd come to greet us with just prime numbers, but I just couldn't figure out how they'd hidden the rest of the message. Or were they expecting us to answer something before continuing?
After hours of fruitlessly staring at the plots and trying different modulations, my shift ended. There wasn't even any plan for what would happen if there was a SETI situation and the only SETI specialist on board needed to sleep, which again showed how impossible the mission planners had considered the situation we were in. Thankfully, the radio engineers—who were excited to have something to do because their systems were only relevant in near-earth space—agreed to take over observing the spectrum for any changes.
There was no way I was going to sleep of course. I snuck away into my maintenance shaft hideout, tapping into the computers there to keep looking into the signal. I thought I might be able to make more progress here, but I just kept going through the same modulation guesses over and over.
I'm not sure when I fell asleep, but when I woke up Ariane was next to me, looking at the signals on my tablet.
"Good morning," she greeted me once she noticed I was awake. I had no idea if it was actually morning. Not that morning meant anything beside a number on a clock out in deep space.
"Did I miss anything?" I asked.
Her hearty laugh made me flinch in my half-awake state. "I don't think anything's gonna happen without you for a bit, everyone else really wasn't prepared for anything like this happening."
"Not sure I was either," I mumbled in response.
She handed me the tablet, with an offhand comment. "It's kinda weird that they can build drives that fast but can't keep their bitrate stable."
"What do you mean?" I asked, still half asleep, beginning to put away the wires connecting to the transceiver systems.
"You know, how the transitions are kind of jittery, just a tad."
I opened my tablet back up and looked at a few of the transitions, as I'd done dozens of times, but I couldn't find any imperfections. "Are you sure? The transitions are all perfectly on zero crossings, and the frequency is just about as stable as we could reasonably expect from our equipment."
Ariane furrowed her forehead in thought. "I only looked at it zoomed out, but I thought I saw that it jitters a bit. Like the excitation pulses on the old mark two drives."
I couldn't think of any reason why that would be the case, but I made the computer count the cycles on each segment of the signal, and there it was. The time between signal transitions varied. But there was only a handful of precise values, in increments of 4096. The only way this made sense was...
"That's not jitter, that's the second coding layer! Let's go!"
Without a further word, I flung myself down the corridor, sticking the tablet to one of the velcro pads on my uniform that I normally avoided using.
"We got it!" I announced as I sailed across the bridge, heads turning towards me. Ariane followed shortly after, still looking a bit confused.
Meyer, Captain Lehtonen's second-in-command, was in control of the bridge and did not like what was going on.
"Barnard, you're way over your shift time already. And Alvarez, was it? What are you doing..."
"She found the next part of the signal, she's with me." I cut him off. He didn't look very pleased, but surprisingly let it slip.
The radio engineer who was operating the SETI console quickly maneuvered himself out of the seat and I immediately got to work putting together a script to extract whatever information was encoded in the very intentional jitter of the prime number signal. It wasn't quite as simple to figure out how exactly the information was encoded. Was it the time between transitions, or the timing of transitions relative to a constant clock?
I found a repeating pattern in the hours of signal we'd already recorded pretty quickly when ignoring all the places there wasn't a signal level transition, so I went with that and tried finding patterns in it.
It seemed Meyer was not quite ready to give in after all. "Barnard, care to elaborate on what's going on?"
I was so excited and focused on my screen that I didn't really register I might be getting myself in trouble, so I replied casually while continuing to work on decoding the signal.
"So as we guessed, the prime numbers signal we found yesterday—was it yesterday or is it still today?—is just the first layer of the signal. The timing of the signal has a slight but precise variation that I think is encoding another layer. What if..." I looked through another test run that didn't give any results. Maybe trying to run linguistic analysis on it was the wrong approach. "What if it's an image?"
It only took a few tries to actually get an image out. Multiple images really, a set of monochrome images arranged vertically. It was, again, using quaternary numbers to represent four different brightnesses, which seemed unnecessary but was apparently just how these aliens did things. The images showed diagrams, lists and tables, all annotated in an unknown set of symbols. Various sine waves were shown in the diagrams.
"We got something. I think they're trying to teach us their signal standards."
The radio engineer who'd vacated the console for me, still hovering above my head, pointed at the screen. "Is that the signal we're getting now?"
With that starting point, we were able to start deciphering the first of the symbols. Another page contained some basic math that helped establish the number system.
Somehow, that radio engineer, whose name I'm ashamed to have forgotten, Ariane, and I naturally became the decoding team. We worked through the pages over and over, finding something new we could understand based on what we had learned. Ariane's uncanny observation ability that had found the timing modulation helped spot details for my linguistic training and the radio engineer's technical expertise to work off of. It was exhilarating to be on the edge of human knowledge, to decipher this math notation that no human had seen before.
Not everyone was as excited about it as we were. Quite a few of the scientists were at least mildly annoyed that their experiment programs had been put on hold, possibly even canceled. The xenophobic fraction of the military group started getting very vocal about it being a trap, and that we should shoot them down while we had the chance. Thankfully, Lehtonen saw the significance of what we were doing. I hoped he'd stay on our side.
We kept working on decoding the signal for the better part of a week, and the alien ship held its relative position for that entire time, patiently continuing to repeat the same signal over and over. I slept far less than I should have.

***

"Are we ready, Barnard?" Lehtonen asked impatiently.
I took a deep breath. "I think so."
"Then let's try this." The captain brushed down his uniform and looked into the precariously rigged up camera. The only cameras normally inside the bridge were security cameras that weren't acessible from the main ship network, and since the specification we'd received was for a video link we'd had to set one up somehow. "Start the system."
"We are transmitting," I replied after entering the command. The data format was fairly basic, with minimal compression, so implementing it on the SDR systems hadn't been nearly as much of a task as deciphering the specification. I kept a close eye on the receiver spectrum as Lehtonen started to speak.
"Crew of the unknown ship. This is Captain Markus Lehtonen of the human starship Discovery. We have received your instructions and wish to engage in peaceful dialogue."
He turned to look at me. I whispered, "Nothing yet," only to be immediately proven wrong. "Wait, they just started transmitting."
After hastily inserting a rotation into the video pipeline based on the sideways picture I saw in the preview and making a mental note to figure out how we'd managed to mess that up, I forwarded the video to the shared screen and took a proper look at it.
The first thing I noticed was that the two creatures in frame were clearly not the same. One of them, which I guessed was the captain or some other kind of leader, sat slouched in a chair that seemed far oversized for it. The other stood behind and to the side of that chair, at least three times the height of the other one, with a rigid straight posture.
Then I noticed the smaller alien had four arms and a face somewhere in between that of a dog and some sort of reptile in shape, covered in short gray fur. I also realized I couldn't actually see anything of the tall one, it was wearing some sort of helmet and a long cloak that covered most of its body. I didn't have any reference that could tell me what their sizes were like in comparison to humans. They might both be tiny, or both be giants, or something in between. Some of the science teams had managed to estimate the size of some hatches on the outside of the ship to be slightly larger than human-scale, so the giant option was unlikely.
I didn't even think that standing on the floor of a spaceship didn't really make sense until Ariane whispered next to me, "How are they getting gravity without spinning their ship?"
Hushed whispers accompanied everyone on the bridge taking in the first extraterrestial intelligence ever witnessed by humans.
Then the alien captain started speaking.
It was a language of harsh sounds and sharp syllables, but yet it managed to sound friendly, almost jovial.
Expectant heads turned towards me, at least those who weren't still busy murmuring to each other, probably expecting a translation. "Can't do magic," I muttered under my breath and looked towards the captain. After a nod of confirmation I unbuckled myself and climbed towards the field of view of the camera. It was time to try and teach english to some extraterrestials.

***

As it turned out, they had no intention of learning english, but rather preferred teaching me their language. I would later learn this was due to them not understanding each others' languages, instead relying on automatic translation technology. Me learning their language—called Yyrhxen in the spelling system I'd hastily come up with to write down what I learned—allowed all of them to understand what I was saying, even if indirectly. At the time, I had nothing but their refusal to learn English to go on though, and no one above me in the ship's hierarchy was particularly happy about it.
We had a semi-regular schedule of language lessons, usually with the captain, Chrdrhaang. A delightfully unpronouncable name, though some of the German-speaking speaking crew members had surprisingly little issue with it. Occasionally there was some other crew member who spoke the same language teaching me, most but not all of them the same species as Chrdrhaang, which called themselves the Xicced. I couldn't quite figure out how long their day was, or if they even had such a concept.
When I was talking to them, I was with increasing reluctance given the bridge. A few other people sat in out of curiosity if they had time, but since they generally couldn't make every session I don't think anyone understood as much as I did. Ariane was probably the most frequent student beside me. In the meantime, some of the scientific programs had started up once it became clear that there was no immediate threat, which at least got about half of the science staff off my back.
What worried me was that the longer I spent talking to them without any of the nebulous results Lehtonen and mission command were looking for, the more likely it became that they'd decide to do something that would get us all in trouble.
I'd tried asking Chrdrhaang for permission to fly closer in towards the planets, but was summarily denied. Not that I could blame him. Or her, or them, or it—any attempt at trying to discuss concepts like men, women and gender had resulted mostly in confusion, so I really had no idea if they even had such concepts. If there was one thing the shot-in-the-dark xenoanthropology classes that were supposed to prepare me for this mission had taught me, it was to question my assumptions.
Getting more and more worried, I came up with another attempt at producing tangible results. At one of the regular meetings that now really grated with my new non-earth schedule, I suggested offering to dock the two ships together. I had no idea at the time if that would work in practice, given we didn't have any major manufacturing capabilities, but surprisingly almost everyone was on board with it.
I don't remember the exact words I used to suggest docking to the alien captain, but given my limited vocabulary at the time it must have sounded either silly or suggestive. When the aliens started discussing in a mixture of languages of which I barely understood a bit of one, I was worried. I might have even accidentally said something untoward. But after some discussion, not only did they agree, but they showed me a frighteningly accurate drawing of our docking adapters. Our military crew was very dismayed at the idea of what they still considered a potential enemy reverse engineering part of our ship from kilometers away.
With the help of some engineers (including Ariane, who I don't think really had anything to do with the docking system but joined in anyway) we got the details down. Chrdrhaang asked for some time—about a week in human terms—to build their adapter.
A week for Hodges and his people, or the planetary science group, annoyed over being kept away from their research objects, or any of a slew of shipboard fractions, to decide against trusting the aliens. I just had to keep it together for that long, but with Lehtonen's initial support now all but evaporated and replaced by impatience and even occasional outbursts of anger, it would be an uphill battle.

***

The small craft sent out from the alien ship slowly drifted across the void, occasionally enveloped in clouds of frozen thruster exhaust. It was a simple cylinder, encrusted in sensors, antennas, thrusters, and fuel lines. The docking adapter, looking awkwardly small compared to the proportions everyone was used to from human spaceships, was attached to the side, rough texture hinting at some sort of additive manufacturing technique used to build it in days where the port it would dock to had taken months.
I was waiting at the connection port to the module that had been closed off as a makeshift airlock, watching the final approach on one of the wall-mounted monitors along the central spine of the Discovery. From what I'd managed to communicate, our atmospheres were compatible, with surprisingly slight differences in composition, temperature and pressure. The airlock was a safety measure I'd insisted on in case I'd missed something.
Somehow I'd managed to keep things together. The most resistance was coming not from the military as i'd expected—for that matter I hadn't even heard from Hodges at all the entire week—but from the biologists, some of whom disturbingly had even started talking about dissecting aliens. Tensions on the ship were the highest they'd ever been.
A dull clunk marked the first time the ship came into contact with solid matter in half a year, against all initial plans.
I switched the monitor to show the inside of the cleared-out storage module. They were as cautious as could be expected, taking the better part of half an hour before opening the hatch on their side. After carefully equalizing the pressure, a delegation of four aliens stepped into the Discovery. Following after one of my language teachers, who was the first out of the hatch, were two of the surprisingly human-like dark-skinned aliens I had occasionally seen in the background.
For the first time, I had a proper size reference. Chrdrhaang's people were tiny, under a meter, and the human-likes, at least the ones present were also noticably shorter than humans.
The fourth alien was a different story though. As it squeezed through the hatch, my heart sank. It was a creature from nightmares and horror movies, mottled gray skin with sickly patches of scales stretched thin over a spindly four-legged frame with skeletal hands, compound eyes staring inscrutably out of a gaunt face. Even as I caught myself and swallowed my prejudice, there was a lump in my throat as I thought about how the rest of the crew might react.
The captain's voice came out of the same wall monitor I was using to check the cameras.
"Barnard, what the fuck is that thing and what is it doing on my ship?"
"Sir I..., I'm not sure. We never discussed..."
"You have one minute to get an explanation before I vent them out into space."
The tone of his voice sent a shiver down my spine.
"Captain Lehtonen, please... We can't jump to conclusions based on appearances!" I pleaded.
"Fifty seconds."
I just froze. Everything I'd worked on for the past month was crumbling, my dream of making peaceful contact with humanity's galactic neighbors falling to pieces right in front of my eyes. From the precipice of what I'd worked towards for years to the precipice of disaster in seconds.
My hand shook as I set the intercom to talk to the airlock compartment, but I just couldn't put the right words together to warn them.
"Get out of there," I cried, but obviously they didn't understand. They'd made sure of that themselves. I beat my fists against the plastic paneling of the walls in frustration.
I checked the time display. There couldn't be more than ten seconds left. I counted down the seconds and...
Nothing happened. Another minute passed with the alien delegation looking around the room in confusion at the commotion. I also checked my surroundings for the first time in what felt like an eternity, the crew members gathered around with me just as shocked and disoriented.
Finally, the intercom crackled, and the last person I would have expected spoke to the entire crew.
"This is Lieutenant Timothy Hodges speaking to all crew members of the Discovery. Captain Lehtonen has been suspended until further notice on my authority due to mental unfitness and risk of triggering extraterrestrial aggression towards earth, according to contingency procedure B.1.2."
I sank to the floor, shaking.
"Barnard," Hodges added. "I know we haven't been on the best terms, but I'm counting on you to make sure we didn't just trigger an interstellar war."

***

Somehow, in part thanks to the language barrier, they never even noticed that one of us tried to vent their delegation out into space, until we explained it to them much later, once we were confident our mutual understanding was good enough.
Qr'csah, the Hksri whose appearance had caused the whole ordeal, turned out to be a wonderful person and an amazing artist. We're still in occasional contact. She gifted me a beautiful metal sculpture of the Discovery when Earth finally joined the UDSA, that now sits on the desk in my office at Assembly Hall.
Also on that desk, I still have a group photo from that day, with the delegation, Hodges, Ariane and me, right next to one of Ariane and me on our honeymoon at the cliffs of Ixaanrian and the name tag that reads, in ten different languages:

Representative Sagan P. Barnard, Earth