A spaceship appears, some distance out of the system's orbital plane. It gets out of the way as fast as possible, and a second ship follows, then a third. Soon there's a whole cluster of them.

Aboard the first ship, a conversation takes place:

"Did everybody make it?"

"All ships present and accounted for!" the comm officer chirps. "They'll never find us out here, sir."

"Thank you, Lieutenant," he mutters distractedly, double-checking the fuel calculations for the fourth time. Margins are going to be very, very tight, but they can hang out here for a while waiting for the Cetagandans to give up and go home, and still have enough juice to make it to Sol system without having to refuel at exorbitant disused-jump-station prices along the way. They'd need to really fuck something up in order to run out before they can get to the next disused jump point station. It'll work.

...he double-checks their supplies of food and water. Yes, all fine there too.

"Uh, sir?" says one of the techs, breaking into his reverie.

He looks up alertly. "What is it?"

She gestures to her vid plate. It takes him a couple of blinks to comprehend the image, because it makes no sense. But - that's an inhabited planet. A lively chatter of comm signals, significant orbital presence - some of that flock is moons, but two of those are inhabited too, and there's stations, shuttles, satellites -

"What the fuck," says Admiral Naismith.

"I don't know, sir."

He stares blankly at the display for a few moments longer, then straightens, jerking his chin up and adjusting his collar. "Then let's figure it out. Analyze everything you can get, find out whose doorstep we're sitting on. Whoever it is, we've just found them a tidy little shortcut to Earth. I can't believe they didn't already have a jump station here..."

Actually, they don't seem to have a jump station anywhere. He frowns at the display. What is this, Barrayar all over again? How many lost colonies can one galaxy possibly hold?

"Um," says the comm officer, "the system's not recognizing any of these data formats. I forwarded some of it to the cipher people and they say they can't detect any language we have on file."

...and that points to a different conclusion entirely. "Do you mean to tell me that we took two hops off the back route between Earth and Orient and found aliens?"

"It sure looks that way, sir."

"Well." He shakes his head. "Let me know when you've got adequate translation and data conversion. I feel that it would be rude to come all this way and then leave without saying hello."

The aliens notice them.

The aliens start trying to say hi.

The fleet notices, and prioritizes understanding the things that seem aimed at them. The very moment someone succeeds in deciphering a transmission, they pass it on to the Admiral.

What do the aliens have to say for themselves?

There are a bunch of transmissions from various countries. This one says: Welcome to Amenta! You seem to be aliens. Here is a book one of our greens wrote to explain our world to aliens. We are the nation of Cene, over here, and we're not involved in the war that is currently ongoing, and if you want to land here and it's safe for you to do that and you're clean we would be very happy to meet you!

The Admiral would like somebody to investigate that war, and somebody else to figure out what they mean by 'clean', before he replies to any of these. ...and in the meantime he'll skim the book.

The war is between the two largest countries on the planet (with some support from some friends) over the one country allowing their food exports to be rendered unclean or at least not verifiably clean. The other country wants one of their farm provinces to achieve domestic food security.

They mean this rather theologically elaborate concept by "clean". The fleet will probably qualify if they all have showers.

The book is assuming less similar aliens than it has in fact reached and has sections on things like what hands are for, and there are hints of differences it doesn't anticipate (it mentions that Amentans can only have children during their hormonal spring between the ages of four and twenty, but instead of saying "and we want a lot of kids" it says things like "most Amentans find it easier to skip a year if they have a one year old from the prior spring" and "although we can induce permanent spring, almost no one likes it, even though it would biologically allow having more children".

...oh boy. Where's that analysis of the planet's population density - order of ten billion, that's around the same as Earth, not too bad - oh, but their habitable land area is significantly smaller - how long's their year - okay, he doesn't need to worry about them overrunning the galaxy this decade, but he should tread carefully and avoid disclosing the secrets of jump tech to anybody who smells of military expansionism.

Cene actually looks like a pretty nice place to land. What are their other options? (While he looks through translated greetings, he sets some of the techs to figuring out how feasible it would be to get the locals to produce a fuel they can use. It would be a bad idea to go visit the nice alien planet and then be stuck there.)

They have invitations from most people including Tapa (the warfare aggressor). The invitations are clad in more or less desperation to figure out FTL. The industrial base could probably handle it with some delay.

He firmly tells himself that no good will come of meddling in this war, and composes a response to Cene's message explaining that they didn't come here meaning to find aliens and their fuel margin is tight enough that they'd really like to have a promise of refueling (here are the specs) before they approach the planet, but once that's settled they would be pleased to accept this invitation.

(Secondary priorities: what is a 'green'?)

Yes, they think they can produce that amount of fuel.

(A green, says the book, is a member of the intellectual and artist caste, and most of them have green hair.)

Then the fleet can come park in a nice out-of-the-way orbit and send down a shuttle!

There are people waiting to greet them! Blues greens yellows.

It's kind of unsettling how humanlike these aliens are. If it was just the hair colour he might be tempted to conclude they were someone's project, but that and the hormonal springs... he can't imagine why anyone would create this species on purpose. Well, the medical people will have answers about the exact degree of similarity soon enough.

"Hello!" he says, pausing to let the translation software catch up. "My name is Miles—Admiral Miles Naismith. It's a pleasure to meet you. We should probably sort out translation first thing, since good communication is the foundation of goodwill—" he beckons to a couple of bright-eyed techs, who come forward ready to discuss the details with their local equivalents "—but I think what we've got will suffice for now."

"Welcome to Cene!" beams a blue. If one observes closely one can see her taking cues from the people around Miles about how to interact with his height, which she proceeds to imitate as though it were her own idea. "I'm President Icalena. Do you have the translation project in hand yourselves or would you like to borrow a local linguist or computer scientist?"

Miles looks to his translation techs.

"Both, ideally," says one.

"From what I can tell, your translation software is comparable to ours in effectiveness but works differently," says the other. "Comparing our respective solutions and sharing linguistic information should be both useful and fascinating."

"There you have it," says Miles.

President Icalena gestures to a yellow, who types into a gadget. "Someone will be along shortly."

"Good, good."

"How is it you got here? We would have expected to notice your ships from farther away and I'm told that when we did notice you more suddenly appeared."

"Wormholes. Gravitational anomalies that lead predictably from one point in space to another."

"That's amazing. Where does the one here lead?"

"You're a couple of hops off the route from Earth to Orient, closer to Earth. Earth is the first planet humans ever lived on; Orient is one of the earlier planets we settled. Preliminary reports suggest there's more than one wormhole in this system, but the others might not lead anywhere interesting; most don't, unfortunately. My own home planet fields the best-trained, best-equipped astronomical survey corps in the galaxy, and finding a system with a habitable planet is still big news."

"But it does happen."

"Oh yes. There's about two hundred inhabited systems in the galaxy, nearly all of them less dense than this place. On the other hand I think some of the difference in density can be attributed to humans having a much lower reproductive drive than Amentans; nearly all of us are satisfied with two or three children over a lifespan of about thirty of your years, and many choose to have fewer than that."

"That's very interesting."

"Sadly we don't have a nice tidy book explaining our species - the general assumption is that if there were aliens we would've found them sooner, a hypothesis I am happy to have disproved. But I think the basic summary of the major differences is 'thirty-year lifespans, average two and a half kids per family without population controls, no universal caste system'."