DATE: Year 487-A, Sol 4

  LOCATION: Jupiter Sagan City 1, Table Hall

  The table chiefs had been meeting non-stop since the bombing of the Hotel Florida, in two groups, the larger official meeting about the bombing, the investigation and the search and rescue mission, and a smaller, more private meeting about the dragons. The NEC ambassador had observer status at the table chief meetings, and the smaller meeting had to be kept away from them. The Saganite ambassador to the NEC had fed the authorities the hologram story and it held up, particularly when they produced a working holographic device.

  The first special team had just returned from the Hotel Florida. They’d been attached to the larger response group the Saganites sent in the immediate aftermath of the bombing. The dragons appeared while the squad was en route to Europa. The special team, therefore, had been selected for their specialization in radical groups, sabotage and violence in general.

  The Saganites had good reason to believe the bombing had been an inside job, and while the NEC said there had been a rise in radical groups funded by the NEC to sow chaos, the Saganites were more interested in having the special team gather information about the small staff left behind and some of the informal management that had set up shop across the hotel.

  They were not equipped for dragons, or the implication that the Jovian aliens were re-emerging. The Saganites had first made contact with the aliens in the first few decades of arriving on Jupiter, during the expeditions to map and plan settlements on the Jovian moons.

  The aliens had been found on the leading side of Europa, a kind of jellyfish-like being, but they communicated psychically and could present themselves in different forms. They had known about humans, having superior telescope technology. They understood space travel but had no interest in it. They’d originally evolved on the atmosphere of Jupiter, and traveled to Europa by hitching a ride on the magnetosphere, arriving on the leading side and never migrating to the dark side.

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  The Saganites spent years looking for evidence of the aliens’ ancestors on Jupiter but were never able to. They decided it was unlikely they’d wiped the aliens on Jupiter out when they landed the sky cities. Based on their population distribution on Europa, the aliens’ footprint would’ve been larger than all the sky cities combined. The aliens on Europa never brought it up.

  The aliens were surprised when the humans came, having assumed based on their observations they would have arrived in the Jovian system long before then. The Saganites established a sort of cultural exchange with the aliens, with a small group staying to live on Europa near the aliens. It became a one-way endeavor. The aliens stayed with the Saganites for a few days and said they’d learned everything they needed to.

  The Saganites and the aliens did both agree that first contact with the wider human race would be unwise, for the humans and for the aliens. The aliens told the Saganites they could have every moon of Jupiter but Europa. The aliens and the Saganites kept their communications limited. With the aliens’ permission, though the aliens said they didn’t need it, the Saganites set up a small base on the dark side of Europa. They kept knowledge of the aliens to a limited circle, which eventually excluded the base on Europa itself.

  No one involved in the decision to build the Hotel Florida knew about the aliens, and now the table chiefs who were privy to the knowledge were certain they were making their first contact in decades, no one was quite sure when the last time had been.

  The Jovian Lunar Federation, meanwhile, which had been investigating the bombing, and took the hologram story at face value, had just reported to the table chiefs that the dragon hologram had been perpetrated by the MTC. The table chiefs knew that was a lie.

  Though the special team that’d just returned had not been briefed on the Europa aliens—there was no need when they were deployed with the rapid response squad—the table chiefs were hoping they’d have some answers.

  Instead, they had messaged ahead on their way back that they’d made an executive decision while outside of radio contact on Europa to bring an unregistered resident of the hotel with them. They said the man could corroborate the NEC claims about MTC involvement. The table chiefs did not see how this was possible, until they got the security alert that the quarantine strut had been locked down because the special team’s passenger was missing. Then the table chiefs knew. An alien had arrived.