On the other side of the mirror is, apparently, a hexagonal corridor with a metal grate for a floor, unnaturally harsh white light shining up from beneath it. The walls and ceiling are paneled in some stranger black material. The air smells…weird. He feels lighter, as though his body is suddenly a third of its usual weight, because in fact it is.
Within seconds of his arrival, an alarm goes off. “Intruder, level four,” says a disembodied voice in a language he doesn’t recognize at all.
Because he doesn't know what that means, the content of the message cannot make him any more alarmed than he already was, but that's pretty alarmed. Why is he lighter. Can he fly - no, apparently this isn't a Fly variant. He looks in both directions along the corridor in hopes of seeing clues to which way he should go.
Well, from one end of the corridor, two armored Martian marines are approaching him. They aren’t wearing helmets, and they don’t have the good armor, so they are still recognizable as men in armor. They aren’t recognizably armed, though Blai may still understand that their heavy machine guns are pointed at him in a threatening manner.
“Freeze! Hands up!” shouts one. Really what one does with intruders on a warship is shoot them but his bosses are going to want to know how the fuck this guy did manage to intrude on their warship in the first place. He is, perhaps, not yet processing how incredibly primitive Blai’s armor is, and he actually doesn’t recognize his mace as a weapon at all.
Blai doesn't know what that means! However, he will regardless hold his hands - not up, exactly, away from the mace and the holy symbol.
They do not shoot him. One of them will come and take the mace—which they still do not recognize as an intentional weapon but could definitely be an improvised one. They don’t take the holy symbol, having no concept that it’s more than decorative. The other will grab Blai’s wrists and cuff them behind his back.
“Look at this shit the skinnies call armor,” says one.
“He looks like an Earther.”
“So does Fred Johnson.”
“How the fuck did he get on the ship, then?” He might have believed that Earth had developed invisibility or teleportation or some shit.
The marines gesture for Blai to follow them and head back down the corridor.
Well, he doesn't like anything about this but he is not commanded to like it. He follows.
They lead him down the corridor and down a flight of metal stairs. At one point they pass a section of wall covered in living plants and artificially lit to almost the brightness of a sunny day, but there are no windows, or drafts, or really any indication that there’s an outside world at all.
Eventually they come to an area that’s recognizably a prison, although everything continues to be made of unfamiliar materials. The doors to the cells are some kind of transparent not-glass.
One of them appears to say something when Blai enters the hallway, although no sound is audible from Blai’s position.
The marines push Blai into one of the open cells and shut the door. (This is done by pressing a button, causing the door to slide out from its concealed position inside the wall with a whoosh.) They take his backpack first, but not his holy symbol.
Once the door is closed, the handcuffs automatically unlatch and fall from his wrists.
There’s a cot in one corner, with a thin mattress that is nonetheless much more comfortable than anything available at the Worldwound, possibly more comfortable than anything available in Golarion if you aren’t rich. In the opposite corner is a toilet. Otherwise the cell is bare.
Maybe this is underground. They look like humans, if strange humans - well, the woman might not be a human? But she could be one, she'd just be an exceptionally spindly one or something. And they have some way to Permanency Daylight so they can grow plants down here. The gravity thing he has no explanation for but stranger things have happened.
He nudges the cuffs into the corner of the cell. He starts taking off his armor, he doesn't need it in a cell. "Do any of you speak Chelish, common Taldane, or Infernal?" he asks the hallway, in case they can hear him, though probably they can't, he couldn't hear the one guy.
No one bothered to turn on the noise canceling on Blai’s cell but they did for all of the other prisoners, and it works in both directions. No one can hear him at all except the marines, who are already leaving. (Babysitting prisoners isn’t their job; the cells are in fact really hard to break out of, and the automated security system will fill the entire brig with knockout gas if it detects any serious attempt at escape.)
Naomi does see his mouth moving and taps her ear twice, which is the Belter sign language gesture for “I can’t hear you”.
He neither understands nor Comprehends Belter sign language but it's easy enough to figure out from context; he nods. Once he's got the armor off he - can't read the Acts, they took his bag. He gives Iomedae a brief sitrep in case She needs that and then Prestidigitates himself a chess set.
Oh.
Nearly all the details of Blai's report are, on closer examination of the situation, inaccurate or misleading, but it doesn't matter, because she wouldn't have been able to see this place at all if Her cleric hadn't called her attention to it. She still cannot see it well—it is very far outside her normal sphere of influence, and prophecy is clouded around the arrival of Her cleric out of Golarion, which is the part of this world that she would ordinarily be able to see most easily. It doesn't matter, because a human civilization that has begun to grow the kind of strength they would need to challenge the Lower Planes on their own territory is the kind of thing that shines in Her vision like a blazing sun.
Also Her lone representative to this civilization is completely out of his depth and doesn't even speak the local language. Her capacity for extraordinary action on the Material has been spent all but utterly, but fixing that last one is, at least, a fairly ordinary action.
One convenient thing about Her cleric being trapped in deep space millions of miles from the nearest planet is that the treaties governing when, exactly, clerics should receive their spells do not fully apply, because a number of their referents do not exist. She still has to grant spells on a fixed cycle with a length within a certain margin of 14,400 standard time units, but Blai has traveled in a manner permitting the cycle to be reset, and since there are—she quickly checks—no other clerics of any god in this star system, there is nothing preventing the new spell-granting time from being 'right now'.
Blai feels the familiar prod that would have told him it was 'dawn' during those months at the Worldwound when the sun doesn't rise or set at all, even though there's no way it's been 24 hours since the sun last rose in Cheliax. Here, have a Comprehend Languages or several. You're going to need them.
- oh, okay, it's dawn Right Now, he will abort the prestidigitation and fall to his knees and get right on that. He will in fact go for a lot of Comp Lang without any prodding as long as he has the opportunity. Three of those plus an Air Bubble for Oh Shit situations. Drop the Spark and pick up a Stabilize, nobody in the cells looks likely to have a medical emergency but they don't seem to be being closely supervised and you never know. Two of Share Language in case anyone'll shake hands later when they're less busy or something, and an Owl's. He'll keep the Create Food, he doesn't know if they feed prisoners here.
Elsewhere, and meanwhile, Blai’s backpack and the books in it have ended up on a table between four deeply confounded MCRN officers plus one of the two marines who initially arrested him, who is only less confounded because that isn’t his job.
“It’s got to be from Earth,” says Captain Yao, examining the pack. “The quality of the fabric is bizarrely terrible but Belter gear looks like it’s made of sixteen different recycled tarps, not like this. Maybe a test subject—no, actually, I’ve got nothing. Did we get anywhere on the books?”
“The computer says it’s a real language unrelated to any other it knows of,” says Lieutenant Lopez. “And that’s ridiculous, right—but maybe someone actually did make up their own language, it would be almost as hard to break as any encryption, and way harder to steal the key…”
“He did say something as I was leaving the brig, sir,” says the marine. “I didn’t catch it but that might have been because it was a language I didn’t speak.”
“People sometimes pretend not to speak a normal language. Because the law requires us to obtain an interpreter for prisoners who don’t. It doesn’t stop me from knowing they’re lying, though.”
“Any progress on translation of the books?”
“No, sir. Well, this one looks like it’s about chess, it’s got the diagrams, and this one is probably poetry if I had to guess. But if it is a conlang invented for obfuscation then that’s probably misleading, right.”
“Go talk to him and see what he has to say for himself.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sometime after Blai is done preparing spells, a man—an officer, from the look of his uniform—enters the brig and opens Blai’s cell door.
“Come with me.”
"Some time" is enough time to have a chess set halfway to created on the floor of the cell. "Comprehend Languages," says Blai, but he can kinda guess and he gets up and waits for informative gestures.
Where’d he get the chess set? Probably not the priority right now.
He leads Blai to the interrogation room they set up for the Canterbury people. He takes a small round capsule from a container on the table and swallows it, and his pupils widen briefly and then narrow again.
“Who are you, who do you work for, and how did you get on this ship?”
He doesn’t recognize any of those words. Why is the subject trying to shake hands? It’s weird but he’ll accept the handshake in the interest of building rapport, which is less important to his interrogation style than it is to some people’s, but is still generally valuable.
“What the fuck?” he says, in Taldane. He didn’t really mean to say it in Taldane but it came out that way.
"I apologize for not having been able to warn you. Is this spell not commonplace here? I think I must be from very far away, if this is a ship it's very different from any I've heard of."
“Spells aren’t real.” The language he’s speaking insists otherwise. “—well, they’re not real here. Where…are you from? Are you actually human or are you just choosing to look that way?”
"I am a human cleric of Iomedae from Cheliax. Which is on the continent of Avistan. ...on the planet Golarion."
Possibly both he and this guy are insane, but, one, if he is, then dealing with that is someone else’s job; two, enough impossible things have happened already that it seems worth investigating the possibility that they aren’t.
“We don’t know of any planet called that. I’m guessing that, if we’re both in our right minds, you’re in fact farther from home than you knew it was possible to be, if you’ve never seen a spaceship before.”
“…you’re currently aboard the Donnager, a warship of the Martian Congressional Republic Navy, under the command of Captain Theresa Yao,” he adds, because it is actually legally obligatory, if he might not already know. “You are a prisoner on suspicion of illegally infiltrating this ship, though if you did not do so intentionally, you have not committed any crime and will be released as soon as is feasible. Did you in fact intend to board the Donnager?”
"No, I was traveling on foot across Cheliax and was attacked by a monster of a species unfamiliar to me which appears to have teleported me here. A space ship? It goes... between planets? Stars?"
“Between planets—it could also get between stars, in theory, but it’s against the laws of physics as we understand them for anything to travel to any but the nearest stars in less than a human lifespan. That’s one of a number of reasons why your story is impossible from our perspective, but it probably is the most prominent one—what is a cleric and who or what is Iomedae?”
"Iomedae is the Lawful Good goddess of victory over evil and triage. A cleric is someone empowered by a god to perform magic, like the spell I just used - there are other kinds of spellcasters on Golarion and relatively speaking we're specialized in healing and support but if you don't have any casters here I'm not sure how meaningful that is."
“Gods, like spells, are something we have the concept of but are mostly agreed not to be real or at least not to have visible effects on the world.” Though it’s not impossible for there to be aliens with sufficiently advanced technology and bizarrely familiar tastes who kidnapped some humans to another planet sometime in prehistory, it’s just insane—
“Shit!” he says, this time not in Taldane.
“The ship is under attack,” he says to Blai. (This is in Taldane.) “You need to follow me.”
That would be to a room with some strange-looking chairs, into which are strapped the other people Blai saw in the holding cells earlier.
“This man claims to be from another star system and to have magical powers,” he tells the other five. “I’m not sure if that’s true but he did arrive on the ship without any physically plausible mechanism, and I also now have the otherwise unexplained ability to speak his language, which even our computers didn’t recognize.”
“Almost certainly, but if I’m not then it seems helpful to have one of you also speak his language, if you’re up for having sufficiently advanced alien technology insert knowledge directly into your brain.”
“If you have another of the language spell you should cast it on her,” he tells Blai, pointing out Naomi.
"Very well," says Blai, "Share Language," and he pokes her hand. "That was my second of two; I'll be able to do it again tomorrow and it does last all day."
It doesn’t verify the whole story, because ‘instantly transferring knowledge of an entire language’ is something you could plausibly do with strong nanotech and ‘FTL travel’ is not. Still, it’s the sort of thing that tempts her to throw out all her models of reality, not just the ones that were actually violated.
”Strap in,” she tells Blai, directing him to an empty crash couch. “Uh, have you ever been on a spaceship before?”
"No, my planet doesn't have them, only the kind of ship that goes on the water." He will attempt to copy their belt configurations.
The belts are designed to be easy to put on very quickly in an emergency; they're not complicated.
"Okay, well, in space there isn't any gravity. You feel yourself as having weight because the ship is accelerating—smoothly towards its destination, under normal circumstances, but in a combat situation the ship may need to change speed or direction rapidly, so we need to be strapped in."
"I don't know exactly what's going on, Mars isn't supposed to be at war with anyone, but it will probably be several hours before anything exciting happens. In space you can see enemies a long way out."
(The ship is starting to accelerate faster; Blai now feels more like his normal weight, possibly a bit more than that.)
"For the next half hour or so I can understand anyone, there's a separate spell that only works in that direction," he mentions, after he's cast a Guidance on general principle.
A railgun round piercing your ship at 2,000 kilometers per second isn’t as loud as you might expect. It doesn’t have time to deposit most of its kinetic energy, and ships’ hulls are very good at dissipating vibrations. There is a thunk, and then a whoosh, and a second or two later you might notice that where there used to be a man sitting in one of the crash couches, there is now a headless corpse, a stream of blood being drawn from its neck through the new hole in the wall into the vacuum of space. Along with, of course, all of the air in the room.
(Shed Garvey, previously ship’s medic for the ice hauler Canterbury, notices nothing at all.)
"I'm looking for one!" she shouts back, unbuckling herself and moving toward the room's small supply cabinet, back to the wall in case of sudden changes in the ship's acceleration. "I don't suppose any of your magic powers would help!"
"I can get you five minutes of air if you can use them to fix it!" He holds out his hand.
The pressure in the room hasn't dropped enough that she's suffocating without it, but it's noticeable nonetheless. She takes a deep breath and starts digging through the supply cabinet, coming up with a hard-sided binder big enough to cover the hole. The seal is far from perfect, but it blocks most of the airflow.
"That should get us, uh—" she takes out her phone and pulls up a barometer app*, runs a quick calculation—"about twenty minutes before the oxygen concentration in the room is too low to keep us conscious. Maybe longer if I can convince the ship's ventilation system to keep sending us air instead of sealing off the room—oh. Wait. How does the air magic work? Will it stop working, or stop working faster, if I do something to share it with other people?" She's found a roll of plastic tubing and is cutting it into four shorter lengths.
(*) Obviously in space your pocket everything would have barometer hardware.
"Sharing it is generally understood not to work well but will not end the spell early," says Blai. "Guidance - would you like one of those too -"
"If you think it'll help." She holds one end of each of the four tubes next to her face. "Everyone take the other end of one and try to breathe through it," she says, first in English, then in Taldane.
The three other people in the room who are still alive have all gotten out of their crash couches and are coordinating with Naomi on trying to find something more permanent to patch the hole. They are in Blai's reach, but haven't been following Naomi's conversation with him because they don't speak Taldane.
"I'm going to give them all Guidances," he reports to Naomi, "they don't have to spend them." He casts and boops them each and himself around and around.
It doesn't really feel like anything, but—
"Mars needs us alive," he says to Naomi. "We're the only ones who can tell the world that they didn't blow up the Cant." If in fact they didn't, which he still isn't fully convinced of. "They're not going to leave us to die on purpose. Forget about the ventilation system, get me intercom access."
It's a lot easier to hack than the ventilation system, because you can kill people with root access to a ship's ventilation system and you can't do that with the intercom.
"Hey dustfuckers," he says into Naomi's phone, and the entire ship hears it, "we're slowly suffocating to death in crash room 4B. If you want us to recant that statement about how you destroyed the Cant you should consider rescuing us."
Two minutes later the door slides open to reveal Lieutenant Lopez flanked by a squad of armored marines.
"Get through," he says, far too professional to sound noticeably annoyed. "The ship's losing air."
"We were coming to rescue you already," he says. Now he sounds just a little bit annoyed. "I have orders to get all of you off this ship alive; follow me." He sets off at a brisk walk, just shy of a jog.
When they're halfway down the hallway the whole ship shudders and they're suddenly weightless. The lights go out for a moment before returning, much less bright.
Lopez and the marines are wearing mag boots and stay grounded; everyone else's inertia sends them flying.
Blai pops his Guidance attempting a grab for a handhold. If he manages that he'll try to catch whoever else he can reach too.
There are handles on the ceiling for this very reason! Everyone is able to get back to the "ground" (what even is up right now) fairly quickly, but there's no way they're going to continue moving forward at their previous pace.
Hopefully the reduced pace is sufficient. At least he isn't wearing armor. If... armor would even... matter in this situation. He re-guidances himself while they proceed.
"They need your mag boots," he tells his marine escort. He is not actually, in expectation, ordering them to stay here and die; even from this point there are still several things that have to go very unexpectedly wrong for the Donnager to be completely destroyed. It's just that enough things have gone unexpectedly wrong already that he has a sickening feeling about it anyway.
The marines take off their boots and each hand them to one of the evacuees.
Okay, sure, he takes off his existing boots and ties them to his belt real quick while he watches the nearest person for how to put on the weird spaceship boots.
The boots are very easy to put on—well, they're very easy to put on if you know how velcro works, but that shouldn't be that hard to pick up. You tap your heels together to activate the magnets that will hold you to the floor even in microgravity.
They reach the end of the corridor, climb a ladder, go down another short hallway, and end up in the ship's main hold, a single vast room that could contain the entirety of Worldwound Fort #11, or, more to the point, the smaller gunship that it actually does contain.
It also contains some unfamiliar troops in black armor, wearing strange visors that distort and obscure their faces, who start shooting the moment they see the evacuees. The three marines who didn't stay behind immediately respond with their own burst of fire.
Fuck. They're all going to die.
"We need to make it to that ship," he tells the group. "My men will cover you. Just keep moving."
They run for the ship, the marines shielding them with suppressive fire. No one is hurt, until—
A ricocheting bullet hits Blai in the lower leg and shatters his ankle (which he can fix instantly) and the control circuit on one of his mag boots (which he cannot).
This time there are no handles on the ceiling, because the ceiling is more than a hundred meters away.
Well, he can fix it but since he doesn't seem to need to immediately take any steps with that ankle he'll wait a bit in case he picks up other injuries or winds up in channeling range of anyone who does. While he goes flying he'll cast a Prayer in case that helps turn the firefight.
His marine escort pulls a device from his utility belt and fires off his tether, which is designed to magnetically attach to a buddy marine's armor. Unfortunately, Blai isn't wearing his armor anymore, so the tether will hit him in the chest and bounce off. With Prayer and Guidance active he can probably catch it, but it might cost him a few seconds of flailing.
It looks like the rest of the group is almost to the ship, so the firefight will be over soon one way or another.
As soon as he catches it his escort reels him in and—just carries him the rest of the distance, there's no way he's going to be able to walk it.
Someone has powered up the smaller gunship and its own guns start moving, which is enough to send most of the enemy troops diving for cover. Blai and his escort make it up the ramp and onto the ship without further ordeal.
"—full access to all systems for all persons now on board," Lieutenant Lopez is saying as Blai reaches him. He's sitting slumped against a console, an enormous bloodstain spreading across his abdomen.
The damage is somewhat less visible than someone unfamiliar with guns might be used to, but he's still pretty obviously dying.
The blood's a hint! Blai grabs his holy symbol and channels. Good thing he waited on the ankle, this is so much more efficient.
He inhales sharply as he's instantly healed from the brink of death to full health. His first thought is not really in words but is somewhere between Holy shit, there is a god! and Praise Iomedae! except that he does not, actually, currently remember Iomedae's name. It's not his first time having divine magic cast on him but healing is really a much more traditional religious experience than Share Language.
His second thought is that giving an MCRN warship to a random bunch of deserters and terrorists seemed like a reasonable and non-treasonous idea, under the circumstances, when he was definitely about to die, and now seems like it's about to make things...complicated.
"You can do that?!" he eventually says out loud. "—nevermind, we need to take off ASAP. Follow me."
The smaller ship is clearly meant to be oriented perpendicular to its current orientation, but it's possible to navigate in this orientation as well. Lopez leads Blai 'up' three decks to the bridge.
"Twice a day, and more single-target trading off against other spells," Blai says, following on his now-whole legs.
"Wait—how—" he starts to say before remembering that the Donnager is presumably about to self-destruct and he needs to keep focusing on getting them off of it as fast as possible. "Right, okay, strap in."
(A crash couch is slightly harder to get into when oriented like this, but Blai has seen one before now, and Lopez can guide him as he works on his own restraints.)
Blai would really like a sitrep but this is clearly not the time so he will simply not do anything about wanting this. He doesn't know self-destructs are a thing, so he doesn't even panic about his books.
(Lopez is not panicking about the books particularly, but he is instructing the Tachi's computer to download a bunch of critical secret files off the Donnager's internal network, including the scans they made of Blai's books.)
They wait another minute while the air is pumped out of the bay, and then the enormous doors open, the thrusters activate, and the ship lifts off the ground, incidentally boiling any enemy troops that happen to still be nearby in superheated steam. The ship creeps slowly out into space, and then—
Normally you get quite far away from a station before turning on your drive but a little drive exhaust is about to be the least of the Donnager's worries. He punches it, and everyone is slammed into their crash couches with five times the force of Earth's (or Golarion's) gravity.
Oof. But apparently this is the system working as intended and it's not going to kill him.
Somewhere behind them is a flash a thousand times brighter than the sun, quickly fading into a rapidly expanding cloud of plasma and debris. Luckily their drive cone is pointed towards it, and drive cones are actually quite good at absorbing nearby thermonuclear explosions, this being kind of their entire purpose in life.
“She’s gone,” he says softly, when he sees the explosion on the Tachi’s scopes, and drops their acceleration to a much more reasonable 0.3g.
“The Martian navy doesn’t permit its ships to be captured,” he tells Blai matter-of-factly. “Though the boarders should have known that. I can’t imagine what they thought they were going to achieve.”
"- my books?" And also his mace and armor but this doesn't actually seem like the kind of environment where those are enormously useful, it's just that they were so expensive.
Fair enough, it's not like he knew any of the people who died.
“We made—copies.” Taldane doesn't have any of the words he would like to use here. “We have—machines that can store and manipulate information very efficiently. Paper books are obsolete for practical purposes.”
He grabs a tablet, loads up the scans of Blai’s books, and hands it to him, quickly demonstrating how to swipe to turn the page. (Technically these are highly classified MCRN files but the regulation obviously wasn’t intended to prevent him from sharing them with the person they stole the originals from.)
"Thank you."
He flips to the back and finds a prayer for dead people to recite, aloud but softly.
He bows his head again as Blai prays. He should probably clarify whether, since gods are apparently real, there are also afterlives. Not now. He can’t think about that right now.
Right now he needs to figure out how to take his ship back.
(According to the prayer there are absolutely afterlives and Blai's religion has very strong opinions about which ones it is okay to go to.)
"Look, forget about making a public statement," he says to Holden, even though Mars is absolutely not going to forget about making him make a public statement. "Mars needs to know what the fuck just happened here, and the six of us are the only witnesses."
"So does Earth," says Holden, pressing some buttons on the console. "So does the Belt—and we'll tell them. We'll tell them right now."
This fucking guy. "Computer, lock all non-essential communications systems to my authorization only," he says, before Holden can start livestreaming to the entire system again. "How about we don't broadcast military secrets over widebeam?"
"Look, there's your problem. The secrets. That was the same ship that destroyed the Cant. Someone is blowing up ships, and they want Earth to think it's Mars, and Mars to think it's Earth. Keeping that shit secret is how you start a war. No one wants a war. Unless, I don't know, maybe you guys do."
Lopez is suddenly angry. "How dare you," he says coldly. "No Martian would ever attack one of our own ships. No matter how badly some of them are itching for a war."
"So then you admit that your people are the ones itching for a war. Because someone is, and it's not Earth, and it's sure as fuck not the Belt."
"Look, every planet has warmongers. Mars maybe a few more than the others. I don't want a war."
"Then help me prevent one. If we go back to Mars we'll be interrogated for the next six months and no one will believe us and the war will start anyway, which is why we're not going to Mars. You can't make us; I know the laws about stranded astronauts. You have to make a reasonable effort to return us to our home port. That's Ceres, so you probably want to let me make that transmission now if you want to be allowed to dock when we get there."
"I'll take you to Ceres. You're not making any transmissions using MCRN equipment without my authorization. What you do when you get there is your own business, I suppose."
"... is there a legal code summary I could read quickly before my Comprehend Languages wears off please?"
Yeah that seems like probably a good idea even though he’s very surprised by anyone thinking to actually do it. He takes Blai’s tablet back for a moment and pulls up the MCRN code of regulations. It’s pretty long and most parts aren’t at all relevant to Blai, but it is well organized; what’s he looking for?
“How much longer will it last?” he asks Blai. “Will my ability to speak your language also wear off?”
"Your and her Share Language lasts twenty four hours. I have another Comprehend prepared but it's still wise to use the time efficiently." He's looking for anything relevant to interactions between (apparently) Martians, Belters, and uncategorized foreigners because it doesn't seem likely they have a category for Golarionites.
The MCRN has extremely extensive regulations on its interactions with the citizens and military personnel of Earth, who need to be treated in accordance with sixteen different treaties; once Lopez shows him how to click links, Blai will see that these oblige both governments to come to the aid of astronauts in distress and return anyone accused of a serious crime to their home planet for trial and treat prisoners from the other faction really quite absurdly well even by Lastwall standards and many other things besides.
The word 'Belter' does not appear in the code at all. There are some references to 'stateless persons', who are still required to be treated in accordance with the Human Rights Act 2138 (still quite good by Golarion standards, but not wildly ahead of Lastwall), but have none of the mutually-negotiated rights that Earthers do; for any of the crimes over which Mars claims universal jurisdiction (piracy, terrorism, human trafficking, theft or destruction of MCRN property, smuggling of contraband goods) they can be tried by a military court even if civilians. Stateless persons reasonably believed to be engaged in piracy or terrorism are considered unlawful enemy combatants rather than civilians and the MRCN is not obliged to accept surrenders from them.
There is a brief section on extrasolar intelligence. MCRN personnel are obliged to immediately report any credible evidence of extrasolar intelligence to their commanding officer. The MCRN is to adopt a diplomatic posture towards any intelligent alien life it encounters; in peace or war, aliens are to be treated as possessing the same fundamental rights and dignity as humans insofar as this is compatible with the continued existence and flourishing of human civilization.
There is then an inscrutable-to-Blai list of types of alien intelligence which, all those other provisions notwithstanding, are to be immediately, ruthlessly, and at all costs destroyed if encountered.
"Do I count as a stateless person given that my state does not have relations with Mars and I am a human?" Blai wants to know, and "Are these described creatures demons or something like that? I do not understand myself to be necessarily bound by these regulations about destroying them but I would like to know if there is good reason to do so anyway and if they're immune to some types of damage or other tactical information," and "Am I currently a prisoner," and "my spell ran out in the middle of this paragraph, but it looked like it was not likely relevant, can you confirm".
"That's ambiguous because we didn't expect there to be humans from outside our solar system, but in practice these regulations are designed for Belters, who don't have a government at all, or at least not one that cares about its people not being pirates and terrorists or has any ability to stop them."
Huh, as far as Blai knows nobody has outright refused to acknowledge the Andorani government on the principal grounds that it throws pirates and chaotic adventurers ("terrorist" can be formulated in Taldane, but only as a nonce word) but he's badly informed about lots of things so maybe somebody does. "It seems worth knowing both how you in particular as the immediately relevant Martian party in the situation, and also others I might one day encounter, are likely to come down on the topic of my classification, given that there is no obvious category to which I might belong instead."
"Assuming your story is true, you are an extrasolar intelligence and Mars would like to eventually establish diplomatic relations with your home planet if we're able to contact them. If you decide to run off and do some piracy I suppose we'd stop you the same as any other pirate, but I really don't think that's an operative concern unless you're in fact planning to go do some piracy. As far as what others will assume, you look like a human, specifically a human from Earth, and if you claim otherwise they'll most likely just think you're insane, at least until we can offer the world some verifiable proof otherwise."
"Uh, as far as those other regulations you were asking about—first of all, you're not MCRN personnel and aren't obligated to do anything; second, none of these things are actually known to exist, it's just types of thing we've theorized about. Things that—would more likely than not destroy humanity if left unchecked." Come to think of it, it's pretty arguable that the situation where this man, even if he is actually human, is given incomprehensible powers by his 'god', triggers some of these conditions. He seems fine, but 'don't fuck around with alien superintelligences' is not a rule you make exceptions to because things seem fine.
(He doesn't say this part out loud.)
"You're not legally a prisoner, but you are obliged to obey my orders while on board this ship and as a practical matter cannot very well leave it. I suppose if you have magic for doing so I wouldn't stop you."
"Understood. I do not. There are plenty of entities that go around killing people if left unchecked and throughout attempts at checking them, I spent twenty years at a border fort containing the demons that arrived on my planet via a portal to the Abyss, so that was the natural comparison."
Concerning but probably not the most concerning aspect of this situation. “At some point Mars will want a more detailed report on such entities and on your world in general, but at the moment I have a rather urgent report to make to my superiors. Did you have any other immediate questions?”
Then he will head down to the captain’s office to compose a report to Fleet Command that will probably make them assume he’s completely insane, but he does have a lot of video evidence of most of the insane claims, so maybe not.
“So, uh, who are you and where did you come from?” the tall spindly woman asks Blai after Lopez is gone. “Sorry, I know you probably just got interrogated about that, but they haven’t told us anything.”
"Repeating myself is not a particular hardship. I'm Select Blai Artigas, Select means I'm a cleric of Iomedae the Lawful Good goddess of victory over evil and triage, and I'm from a planet called Golarion. I was attacked by an unfamiliar species of monster on my journey to a political convention I was expected at in my home country, and it transported me to the ship."
“Tell me more about Iomedae? We don’t have gods here, at least not ones that give people magic powers. Some people are religious but it’s usually based on stories from thousands of years ago, before we had video recording.”
A goddess of victory over evil is theoretically a good thing but she has some pretty serious reservations about the exact definition of ‘evil’ being used here, actually.
"Iomedae is an ascended mortal. In life She was a paladin - sort of like a cleric but more martially oriented and only ever Lawful Good, so only ever empowered by gods who are themselves Lawful Good, Neutral Good, or Lawful Neutral. Her patron was the Lawful Neutral Aroden, himself ascended to godhood after having in life been an archmage. Iomedae is slightly less than a thousand years old all told. We do not have video recording, but it is possible - though not to be undertaken casually - to get up to date answers on questions for gods, or to hear from lesser beings that dwell in the same planes as them."
Having experienced the magic herself, she is not actually inclined to be very skeptical that Iomedae exists, merely whether She and her followers are as Good (she can hear the capital letter; why??) as they claim. 'Ascended mortal' is good news there but hardly dispositive. This man, or more likely this man's entire culture, seems to have a very—formalized—way of thinking about morality that at first glance she doesn't exactly like.
"You said she was the goddess of defeating evil; what sort of things does She consider Evil?"
"Are you asking about Iomedae's particular anathemas or about Evil in general? She's not the arbiter of what things are good or evil, that's the province of Pharasma the Judge."
Wow, she likes this even less than she did six seconds* ago. "...both? I've never heard of Pharasma, how did she get to be the arbiter of good and evil and why should anyone listen to her?"
(*) Why does this language have a monosyllable for that?
"She created the universe. Her moral opinions about what things are good or evil mostly align with human common sense, it's Her sentencing behavior in the afterlife that Iomedae objects to, no one should go to the Evil afterlives."
“…we have the concept of afterlives, including afterlives of eternal punishment, but no credible evidence that they actually exist…does your world definitely have them?”
"What the fuck. Uh, is this the sort of thing where the ability to make very large explosions would help? Your tech level does look notably lower than ours, judging by your clothes and stuff."
"...I cannot rule out that very large explosions might usefully feature in a Heavenly campaign against Hell provided they are not fire explosions specifically, as devils are immune to fire."
She is probably not going to get useful information about how "fire" "immunity" actually works from this man in hand-spun clothing. "Whether our weapons count as 'fire' is probably kind of complicated. I don't personally command any military resources, but, uh, whatever their other faults, both Earth and Mars will want to do something about this when they hear about it, if they can be convinced it's real and not a trick by the other one to distract them. Do you have a way of getting in touch with Iomedae directly, or anyone else in Heaven?"
"Well, I can pray to Her at any time for free. So can you, if you'd like, though it's reasonable to expect I'd get more attention. It's Her replying that's expensive. With the appropriate spells I can summon a lantern archon out of Heaven for thirty seconds, or call one indefinitely but it will require compensation for its time and risk - possibly being put in touch with whoever can supply very large explosions will be sufficient, though. I am not powerful enough to Plane Shift anyone directly to Heaven, though."
She'll try praying...later, perhaps. "You should probably, at some point, talk to an actual government about that, not that I imagine you'll be given a choice not to." Vaguely apologetic expression. "It's going to be a long trip, do you mind if I read some of your books while I speak this language?"
And, meanwhile, in an office on Callisto, a man is reading a deeply disturbing report from one of his subordinates.
He has to consider, of course, the possibility that Lopez has lost his mind. He doesn't actually consider it for very long. There's video evidence. There's biometric evidence of the miraculous healing. All of it fakeable, especially since he's receiving it as an after-action report rather than live during the battle, but that's not something a man suffering immersive hallucinations would probably think to do. No, the hard question here is not whether to relieve Lopez of command because he's insane. The hard question is whether to kill everyone on the Tachi with as little warning as he can possibly give them because they've all been compromised by an alien superintelligence, because that, regardless of the intentions this 'Iomedae' has towards humanity, does appear to be the approximate shape of the thing happening.
In the end, he doesn't do it, because it wouldn't work. It might have worked, if they had blown Phoebe to plasma the moment they discovered the blue goo, and perhaps they should have done that, but by the time the alien god can manifest an entire human with magical healing powers, there's really not much they can do but be grateful it apparently wants to talk.
"Thank you for your report, Lieutenant. My condolences on the loss of your crewmates."
"You are hereby ordered to report to Jovian Fleet Headquarters for a full debrief and medical evaluation. You are further ordered to escort your civilian charges, including the extrasolar intelligence identifying as Blai Artigas, to Fleet Headquarters for evaluation and questioning. You and your charges are hereby placed under quarantine, owing to the risk of exposure to extrasolar pathogens, invoking the necessary quarantine exception to the Interplanetary Convention on Stranded Astronauts. The emergency access to ship systems that you granted to your civilian charges has been revoked."
"I hope to see you all here soon."
"Hey Blai," Naomi asks, after some tense arguing among the rest of the crew in a language Blai can't understand, "do you have a way of getting a message off this ship? Mars is refusing our request to be taken home and we'd like to discourage the scenario where they make us all disappear, either because they think we blew up the Donnager or because they're panicking about alien superintelligences or both."
"...if I called a lantern archon that could do it? They can teleport. Is the... alien superintelligence they're panicking about, Iomedae? They wouldn't be wrong to panic if it were an evil god, really..."
“Uh…not exactly, from our perspective it seems really very unlikely that there’s another star system with humans like our humans except that they have magic powers and can become gods, and a lot of people are going to wonder if you’re actually human at all or if you’re actually something very alien and very powerful that’s appearing human for inscrutable reasons. And the conventional wisdom about beings like that is that they’re very bad news. The thing where your world’s evil gods publicly advertise this fact about themselves is really very bizarre, and no one is going to believe that the good gods are actually aligned with humanity just because they say so.”
“You said your summoning spell only lasted thirty seconds, right? Do you know if teleportation is limited by the speed of light?”
"I don't know about that, but it does have a limited range - or, the fifth circle version does, I don't recall for certain if the lantern archons have that or the more advanced version. I don't mind being - examined? - to demonstrate that I am a human. Though I suppose I can't rule out that I might be some small percentage something else far back enough to forget. Anyway, summonses last thirty seconds but a calling can be longer, it'd just require that I have some way to compensate the archon for its time and risk."
“If the limit is less than the size of a planet then it’s probably useless in space, but it seems worthwhile to let Heaven know that our civilization exists in case we get killed? I don’t know how the compensation thing works, are they willing to be paid in, like, ‘the knowledge that nukes exist’, or do they want some kind of money that I don’t have?” She’s not going to acknowledge having noticed Blai’s admission that he might not be entirely human; she’s not racist.
"I have been giving Iomedae sitreps periodically, so She knows, and if that's somehow insufficient then if we all die I expect to arrive in at least Axis and to be able to contact Heaven from there. Compensation - varies - an inevitable would probably want some kind of negotiable commodity though I'd expect them to be able to access moneychanging services in Axis but I don't think the kind I'd be able to call can teleport. I don't know whether or not Heaven knows nukes exist. Perhaps they do and they're irrelevant, or the Outer Planes are barred by treaty from using them, or they already are and this information simply never made it back to Golarion. Perhaps they don't, but they would be irrelevant or forbidden. So I don't know if it might constitute a valuable piece of information. Credible promises of good deeds that would not otherwise be done are I think standard fare for angels in general and that probably includes lantern archons."
“I can…promise to use my newly acquired notoriety to evangelize as many people as I possibly can about the fact that hell exists and needs to be destroyed, which I would probably do anyway but not if I die or spend the rest of my life in a Martian prison,” or actually an Earther prison is more likely, but she’s not going to mention that. “I could also promise to volunteer or donate to charity or whatever but the first thing seems much more important, so. I’m not sure if that works, but what’s the cost if we try it and the offer isn’t accepted?”
"I don't know specifically. I barely even know vaguely. There is a lot I don't know about how this works, because information about how it works, itself, is expensive. Iomedae can cut off my spells if I mean to use them in a way She doesn't approve of, but that, too, is expensive information, it communicates very clearly - and to only one person who by then would no longer even be one of Her clerics, it's not even one-to-many - that She does not approve of something. The way I was supposed to learn about that is by communicating with the rest of Her church, not by speculating wildly. I was warned not to attempt an untrained Commune, and wasn't warned about summonses or callings; but I don't know exactly what led to that and it could be an idiosyncrasy of the person I was corresponding with. But it might cost Iomedae in particular - because of it being me doing the casting - or Heaven in general - because of it being a lantern archon - perhaps quite a lot of intervention budget, and then in some other situation where they can refrain from stepping in to make something, somewhere, go well instead of badly, they will stay their hands. I wish inevitables could teleport. An inevitable I am reasonably sure you can just pay in money, and I don't know Axis to be in quite such dire intervention budget straits as Iomedae. - I suppose it is not necessarily completely and wildly out of the question that you could pay an inevitable to go home to Axis and buy a Sending there on your behalf? It would cost a quite phenomenal sum even if the answer were 'absolutely not' because the answer being 'absolutely not' is information."
“Okay. It’s not urgent; it’ll be at least another day before we get where we’re going, so if there’s another spell you can prepare tomorrow that would be better, we would appreciate it,” (she has by now read enough of the Acts to get the concept of spells per day); “if not, I can probably find some nonmagical way of getting comms access back. I do expect that if the Martians don’t decide to kill you they’ll want you to do a summoning so they can confirm that Heaven, you know, exists, but they can figure out how to pay in that case.”
“What’s Axis? Heaven and hell map to concepts our religions sometimes have but I’ve never heard of Axis.” The Acts mention it plenty but mostly with the assumption that everyone already knows about it.
"Thirty seconds of a summoned lantern archon I would expect to be much cheaper - it's not risky for the archon, for one thing, it's not their real body, just a projection they operate from back in Heaven - if that will serve for proof. Axis is the Lawful Neutral afterlife."
“Okay, I can guess from context what ‘Lawful’ ‘Neutral’ means but does your world just—have a whole three-by-three grid of afterlives?” It’s honestly incredibly normal for a system designed by a random alien superintelligence but it’s still fucking bizarre. “Religions here that claim afterlives exist usually only claim one or two, I don’t think there’s any that say there are nine.”
