DATE: Year 487-A, Sol 25

  LOCATION: Arrokoth (Kuiper Belt)

  Ganna Grover had set up a line to Pluto to get more updates, there was so much going on. The Saganites had taken over each of the inhabited moons of Jupiter with the help of the Europa aliens. Alien infiltrators were only found on Themisto, the first moon the joint Saganite-alien force went to.

  The Jupiter Lunar Federation largely disintegrated. Many of the human leaders were arrested when the Saganites got to Themisto. A few of the leaders on some of the other moons greeted Saganites as liberators, so the reports went, because they were so desperate for resources. The Saganites declared several settlements across the moons of Jupiter as uninhabitable, requesting the NEC help relocate them to Mars. That included the entire population of the Hotel Florida.

  Grover had never been to Jupiter, let alone Mars, and wondered what that kind of resettlement would look like. It sounded like the Saganites were going to hand Europa over to the aliens. The church was involved, they said there was a diocese already for the aliens.

  The Kuiper Saganites, meanwhile, had been tasked with sending out ships to look for the so-called edge dragons, with telemetry provided by the Europa aliens.

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  Grover had been ordered to follow along the zipline as far as she could to search for any anomalies. She knew these were the dragons her parents had seen. She didn’t expect to find any. Had the Europa aliens who made it to the edge been here, surely they’d been detected by one of the Kuiper Saganite observation stations.

  She did find an anomaly, in the structure of the zipline, not something her superiors on Pluto had told her to look for specifically. But Ganna thought, what if the edge dragons had been further out on the zipline? Based on the aliens’ story, the dragons had shown up when the zipline first started functioning. Grover didn’t expect the Kuiper Saganites told Jupiter that, though it was likely the Saganites on Jupiter already knew. They’d been keeping track of it.

  Her thoughts didn’t feel like her own. She was thinking through things she knew, like somebody was in there in her head trying to sort out the story.

  Then the zipline started to collapse. Grover felt a great sadness, like something had been lost, even though the readings didn’t immediately make sense. Then it looked like the zipline might’ve been released from the other end. She was seeing the signals of a foreshock. She put it together just in time to fire up her engines and get out of there.

  Arrokoth probably wasn’t going to make it. She set a course back to Pluto, then changed her mind and set a course for Jupiter instead. She didn’t have the fuel to make it all the way, but she had supplies and there’d be a way to refuel along the way. She knew there was nothing on Pluto for her.