Jinye does not understand why people want to interact face to face so much??? Jinye always feels most comfortable having a computer running six different espionage/analysis programs between her and anyone she's talking to. "We do have that moon; if we ever get back, I'll make sure to let everyone know to be careful with it." She wants to hear that long story, at some point.

"I think I'd like to stay in real-time communication with my crew until we've finished our scans," she says, "particularly of the alien artifacts, but if you wouldn't mind taking a few technical experts I'm sure they'd be fascinated to see your station."

Yeah, Jinye is not confident that six battleships aren't going to come out of Ring #0 (whichever one that really is) at top speeds, weapons blaring, disable the Cor Leonis, and then seize everyone on the ship for interrogation and dissection. She does, however, think that risking a couple of junior techs is worth it to get a closer look at the alternate-timeline technology.

She's also going to want to pick up anything she can from Medina Station's internet.

Drummer realizes that Jinye is probably afraid of being taken hostage or something, and isn't at all offended by that, even though she absolutely did not intend to take anyone hostage! She knows what politics are like, and it's not as though being from an alternate universe is likely to make trust issues better. She hopes her attempts to establish cooperation are reciprocated someday, though.

She'll be happy to take a few Attani techs and put them in contact with the OPA's own engineers. Who are about 50% Naomi by usefulness, but Naomi will be back in a few days.

No ships are going to come through the gate at top speed and seize everyone! Earth or Mars might do that, if they knew the Attani were there, but they don't, and there's only three ships stationed at the ring anyway. The rest are multiple days of travel away, because these humans will be turned into jello if they try to maintain the acceleration that the Attani do. No one would dissect anyone at all, even if it weren't a war crime there'd be no reason to.

Medina Station's mirror of the Internet is small but it should be enough to get up to speed on anything happening in the system; what do Jinye (and/or Ting) want to know about, based on their conversations with Drummer and the news broadcasts they picked up?

Wikipedia. They want Wikipedia. Also a list of the most popular news stories of the past five years, official information on fleet sizes and ship sizes within fleets, what kind of acceleration they were supposed to pretend to have not to stand out too much, and explanations of how local computers work so they can take them over if they need to, but most of that stuff is going to be on Wikipedia.

The practical teams studying the topic are focused on:

- Reconstructing capabilities of fleet compositions, fleet strategies, and ship designs from publicly-available information.

- The HELL is up with all this alien technology nonsense, how did humanity survive it.

- Who are the main political players in all the factions, are there just three factions or are there, like, nine hundred, and what are the subfactions looking like.

- So there's Gates to, like, a billion worlds? What's up with that. How many of them have we just settled. Can we have one. Or two. Or sixteen.

And they'll send a shuttle over with two of the most enthusiastic-about-being-trapped-in-the-past techs they've got, given lightning guns instead of hand needlers. They give mannequins lightning guns, even if the locals get ahold of them there won't be any kind of crisis.

And while they're doing this, Jinye is going to keep talking to Drummer! "So, can I ask you to give me a quick survey of the situation as you see it? I'd like to get some idea of exactly where we've landed, and just what the short version of that long story you mentioned looks like."

Oh wow she is probably not actually qualified to present a more-advanced civilization with the case for why they should ally with the Belt instead of Earth or Mars, which is presumably what she's tasked to do in this situation? Belters definitely have lots of objective advantages over Inners but they're subtle, sometimes, and she's acutely aware that the Attani have probably taken one look at Medina Station and drawn reasonably accurate conclusions about the Belt's military capabilities.

She starts with the question that's actually, somehow, easier, all things considered. "A couple of years ago researchers on Phoebe found the protomolecule." She sends across a picture. "Some sort of nanotech. It—eats—living things, and the more it eats, the smarter it gets, and the smarter the things it eats, the smarter it gets. Some rich and powerful Earthers thought they could control it and were rich enough to bribe high-level people in the UN to look the other way while they did horribly unethical medical experiments.

"They infected the entire population of Eros Station in what I can only assume was a deliberate attempt to make it smarter. This definitely worked. The asteroid started moving under its own power and accelerating at 20g straight for Earth.

"So, yeah. The UN was about to nuke the shit out of it when—don't ask me how—" there are theories but they're way too ridiculous to tell the Attani "—it changed its mind and decided to hit Venus instead. Eventually it finished what it was building, which flew way out into the outer solar system and built the Ring. A wormhole into this space, which has all sorts of weird properties—at one point when we were exploring, we spooked it—no, I don't know what 'it' precisely is—and it decided to make it so that nothing with mass in here could move faster than 30 meters per second. I say that just to give you an idea of the power level we're dealing with here.

"Anyway, we managed to get it to calm down and not destroy the solar system, and then it opened up all these other gates. About 1300 of them, I think. About two-thirds have habitable planets, and the other third are some kind of stellar remnant, which suggests they used to be habitable and then died out. A few have human colonies but we haven't been at it very long. If you wanted to claim one of your own the OPA wouldn't stop you but Earth or Mars might try. One of my close friends was part of a recent peacekeeping mission to one of the new colonies, trying to mediate between the Belters who got there first and the Earth corporation who lay formal claim to it afterwards. I hear they got into a lot of weird alien shit in the process, though, so do that at your own risk.

"They'll be back in a few days and we can ask them. The UN's censored most of the news about the weird alien shit, because Earth is massively overpopulated and they don't want to make people scared to leave, I guess."

Information from Wikipedia not covered by Drummer:

Public information about fleet designs. Most civilian ships cruse at 0.3g; military ships in a hurry will sustain 2 or 3 and regularly get above 10 in maneuvers, but for the latter the crew are strapped to specially designed couches with intravenous drugs to help their bodies deal with the strain. Belters and some Martians mostly can't even survive Earth gravity for long periods, but Martian soldiers, at least, train in higher gravity to be prepared for a possible invasion of Earth.

Earth (the UN), Mars, and the OPA are the only major factions. Earth and Mars are democracies with all the bullshit that usually entails. The current Secretary-General of the UN just lost an election to a candidate whose main differentiating position was being even less careful about the alien shit. The OPA has a million subfactions but at least some of them are basically just gangs of pirates trying to capitalize on the general amnesty issued the OPA on various charges of terrorism that are now recognized as part of a righteous struggle for independence. For some incredibly bizarre reason, the overall head of the OPA, Fred Johnson, is an exiled war criminal from Earth whose most famous action in the UN Marine Corps was massacring a bunch of Belter civilians. Klaes Ashford, Drummer's XO, was once the most infamous pirate in the system and now heads the OPA's anti-piracy fleet. (At least Drummer herself doesn't seem to have such an incredibly dubious past.)

There's also the crew of the Rocinante, a mixed-origin group of former ice haulers now crewing a stolen legitimately salvaged Martian gunship as basically mercenaries, but, like, not for the money, for the good of all mankind or some incredibly improbable bullshit. They seem to be mixed up in at least half of the major international incidents of the past three years, including what appears to be the peacekeeping mission Drummer mentioned.

Rocinante: Hey, Jinye's working for the good of all mankind! It's not that improbable! She's just working for it via trying to make sure it gets the best leadership it possibly can, like, say, her.

Protomolecule: AAAAAAAAH!!!!! She will try not to scream too visibly! This is exactly the sort of situation where Ting would step in before it got this bad to prevent the annihilation of all life, not that he would need to because the Emperor is a horrible person but very very good at his job! AAAAAH! Every aspects of this except how there are people left is exactly how she would expect things to go if humanity started messing with alien artifacts! She is never trusting any Earther ever they are complete lunatics AAAAAH!

AAAAAH!

... Okay, screaming silently inside her own head does not actually help. "Thirteen hundred gates," she says, carefully-managed awe in her voice. And one chokepoint that every ship traveling to or from over eight hundred planets passes through. And their defenses consist of Medina Station. She is so incredibly tempted to declare she's siding with the OPA, just because they need her the most, but since she can't extract any pay in advance and the UN probably has battleships that could shoot down the Cor Leonis, she isn't going to try to, but the current state of the universe is one where exactly one faction is about to dominate all of human space - or at least thirteen hundred gates' worth - and nobody is going to be able to do anything without it until the dominant faction gets unbearably stupid.

(This could still happen, but given how little space wormhole physics textbooks take up, if Mars takes the station over, she can sell Earth what they need to build a wormhole tunneler, and vice versa.)

"Thank you for that update. I owe you a favor, Commander Drummer." She very much appreciates it. She should probably drop to four or five Gs of acceleration where people can see her. "This would be the kind of weird alien shit where they declare nothing can move faster than thirty meters per second?" In whatever arbitrary frame of reference they happen to be using.

The Attani reading this are going to sort of stare at the idea of a world where military ships in a hurry sustain three gravities. I mean, yes, if you're on a pre-artificial-gravity ship you use crash couches, that's common sense, but...

They are also going to try to read everything they can get about key leading figures on Earth and on Mars, and to try and learn what the main factions are and the main differences between the factions are, with an eye towards learning who they should talk to.

(Also, seriously, what's up with Fred Johnson?)

"If the message I got from Naomi a few days ago is anything to go by, this was the sort of weird alien shit where they accidentally re-activated a billion-year-old fusion reactor several kilometers across, which then exploded, if you're trying to get a finger on the x-risk here. That's to say nothing of all the even weirder alien shit around how they managed to stop this from being worse, like, for example, the ghost that lives in James Holden's head."

A lot of Belters don't trust Fred Johnson, only partly on account of the whole murder thing! "Head of the OPA" is a pretty nebulous position, he doesn't have much power without the consent of a pretty large majority-by-strength of the various subfactions. But he was arguably baited into his original crime (his superiors never told him the station he destroyed had surrendered), genuinely remorseful about it, and joined the Belt's cause with resources only an Earther could provide, as the longtime head of operations for the largest manufacturing corporation in the system.

The other person you could arguably call the head of the OPA is Anderson Dawes, born dirt-poor on Ceres, whose parents had once worked for the same company whose striking workers Fred Johnson later killed. He is largely responsible for recruiting Fred Johnson into the organization, a gesture some might interpret as forgiveness.

(The ghost that lives in Jinye Attani Cocoon's head grins at her while organizing helpful charts in the corners of her vision.)

"... Count me impressed that humans still exist in this timeline," says Jinye drily. "Do you know if this is typical of colonies, or if this is just typical of James Holden?"

Pause.

"... Ghost?"

"I would not be surprised if the other colonies have buried problems of similar magnitude, but to my knowledge they have remained buried. It is mostly just typical of James Holden to go digging them up, although, to his credit, he doesn't seem to be doing so intentionally.

"My understanding is that it's the protomolecule, talking in his head using the image and neurally-scanned personality of a guy it ate on Eros. But you're really going to have to ask him about that part."

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, Ting, I know, Ting, "murder and dissect James Holden" is now on my to-do-list, Ting, you don't need to tell me!

"So, these... alien nanomachines. That built the Gates. Are they not doing anything now... because they accomplished all their goals and are now dormant? Or because the rest were contained? Or is there something important going on with them that I'm missing? I rather feel that, important as politics is, existential threats to humanity might be slightly more so."

"Small samples of the protomolecule contained without anything to feed on appear to be dormant. I'm probably allowed to tell you that several such samples exist but anything beyond that is classified information.

"I should also remind you that the civilization that created the protomolecule, powerful as it was, is itself extinct, and we have no idea why. Those of us worried about the extinction of humanity are mostly worried about whatever did that.

"On the other hand, I'm not really the one most qualified to answer any of these questions."

"Understood." The easiest explanation for what happened to them is that they blew themselves up, see the kind of random tech they're throwing around, but while that would be nice to believe she doesn't actually believe it.

She pauses. "In that case, once our tech team gets back, I think we may want to pay a visit to Sol. Asking frankly, if James Holden isn't in the system, what do you think our odds of not getting shot on sight are?"

"You'll be target-locked, and probably boarded, on sight if any Earth or Mars ship gets a close enough look at you to figure out there's something weird going on, but you won't get shot. Speaking of which, I'll make sure to send your tech team back with a proper set of transponder codes so you don't look like pirates, and instructions on how to disguise your drive signature so you don't stand out from a billion kilometers away. It will probably make your engines less efficient, but if you go rocketing across the system at 20g with whatever inertial dampening tech you have you're going to attract a whole lot of attention anyway.

"The person I do think would be most qualified to talk about protomolecule-related things with you, if that's what you want to do, would be Naomi Nagata, who is not currently in the system but will be passing through here in about 3 days. She's a very old friend of mine, probably the smartest person I know, and I trust her greatly. Unfortunately, you may not be inclined to, since she's now part of James Holden's crew." And dating him, but no need to make Jinye scream too much all at once.

"I greatly appreciate your advice on how not to look like an alien menace," Jinye says. (In fact, twenty gs was chosen to be plausible not to be inertial damping, just crash couches and good drugs and lots and lots of genetic engineering. Unfortunately...) "I have nothing against crew members of James Holden's -" from a distance, at least, or if sterilized in plasma "- but I think we'd rather not wait three days, if possible, since I'd rather not ride into Sol on a wave of superstitious rumors about my coming. Unfortunately, being boarded seems... less than ideal." She is going to sell her people's advanced technology, not give it away. "I'm not sure what the best way to resolve this difficulty is."

"If you're asking for me to give you OPA military transponder codes or something, I'm not going to do that, and it's not as though it would make you less likely to attract the attention of the Inners, peace treaty or not." The obvious reaction of either Earth or Mars to a ship like Jinye's with OPA codes is that the other one has advanced tech they're lending to black ops assets in the Belt. "To be quite honest, if you can pull 20 g's sustained, it's not as though they could catch you to board you." Well, not quite, missiles can pull a thousand, briefly, but they'd have to be really incredibly stupid to end up within hammer-lock range of an Inner ship by accident, and they are clearly not stupid.

"I'm not asking for transponder codes; just that I don't know the situation here, and I was wondering if you have any suggestions for how to come in like the representative of a foreign power, instead of like a scavenger who just picked up an alien ship she can't expect to keep."

Without starting a war, that is.

"The main problem here is that if either Earth or Mars come across technology, especially military technology, they haven't seen before, they're likely to assume that the other one developed it and is planning to use it against them, and are unlikely to be persuaded otherwise, especially if the true explanation is really incredibly implausible. The events of the past few years have hopefully done something to beat this habit out of them but I would not stake too much on assuming it's done enough.

"My impression, beyond that, is that you have at least as much experience being a representative of a foreign power as I. The obvious answer, however, is: represent power. Which, in your position, I would probably do by implying as strongly as I could get away with that I was in contact with my high command and they had a thousand more ships like mine ready to come through the gate at any minute."