“Greetings, Earthlings! We come in peace! Please let us speak with your leader! Over!”

  After hearing the cliché so old it predated manned spaceflight so many times, Trout would have thought he would start finding it mocking. Yet each time, the words were spoken with such earnest sincerity that he couldn’t help but take it with amused indulgence, like a child trying to be serious… or one saluting because they’d been told that was how the navy showed respect.

  At least, that’s how Rain’s voice always sounded through their suit. Though on consideration, perhaps that was by design. Perhaps there was some kind of anatomical visual cue of mockery hidden by that all-concealing space suit.

  Trout chose to give them the benefit of the doubt.

  The communications officers were monitoring the signal, just in case it was the vector of some kind of IW attack, but they considered the likelihood to be extremely low. This was the most basic method of radio-based voice communication, so simple it could be done at a hardware level. Anything hidden would come out as static, and even in the unlikely event that there was some weakness in their combined software and hardware, the communication’s officers were watchful of the possibility.

  “This is the FTCS Venture reading you loud and clear,” Trout heard the communications officer manning the equipment stay through the headphones he was wearing. “We read you loud and clear. Please identify, over.”

  There was a brief pause before the reply, and it took Trout a moment to remember that they were over the horizon from Stargazer Fortress, meaning that the Kaedekin were probably bouncing communications off a relay of some sort. “This is Star Ranger Paladin Rain, reading you loud and clear Venture,” came the reply. “Simple communications protocol established. Should we proceed with trying to establish a true polyphony communications protocol to further streamline communications, over?”

  The communications officer glanced at Trout, but didn’t wait for orders before answering in the affirmative. The gift of a book of communications protocols had made it clear that the Kaedekin would want to establish proper long-distance communications, and so he’d given orders for them to pursue that. If the Kaedekin hadn’t requested it, the communications officers would have. “Acknowledged, Paladin Rain. Ready to proceed with true polyphony communications. Do you have a preference as to the protocol, over?”

  “We’d like to try true polyphony protocol 3, if that’s all right with you. It’s protocol 7 overall, on page 26, over…”

  As much as Trout was looking forward to speaking with the alien again—if only to try and get more clear answers from them—comms IT matters were clearly the priority today. Once the Kaedekin and the comms officers managed to agree and establish a polyphony protocol, they began to work on an audio-visual communications protocol, while Trout let the watch officer run the bridge as usual and went to sit at his chair to do his paperwork while listening to the exchange between the comms officers and the Kaedekin through a headset with half an ear.

  More reports had come in from people working around the clock, or had gone to sleep with their report mostly finished so they could sleep on it and complete it in the morning, which were now coming to Trout’s tablet. There were reports analyzing the relative lack of importance of the Kaedekin’s ‘Sky Rangers’ and positing that it might be a result of the lack of visibility in the planet’s atmosphere, one speculating that the ‘Void Rangers’ were some kind of combined arms special forces group, three that speculated that the Kaedekin might be a monogender species like the Tiwada because they used feminine plural pronouns when they spoke Atsinagi and Pagabat while only ever referring to ‘sisters’ when talking about other Kaedekin, another specifically disproving one of the monogender papers because there was reference to something called ‘buddies’ and concluding that the Kaedekin might live in an extremely sex-segregated culture, an update on the increased space traffic going up to Stargazer Fortress, a report on the preliminary topographical scan of the part of the planet directly below them…

  A normal day at the office, in other words.

  “We’re seeing a gray ceiling. Is that what you’re transmitting, over?”

  “Affirmative, ma’am. Your own footage is coming in loud and clear.”

  “All right! Videotelephony protocol established on our end! Confirm on your end, over?”

  “Videotelephony protocol confirmed, ma’am.”

  “All right! This is about the extent of what our equipment can do right now. Our tech officer says we’ll need to exchange digital communications protocols first before we can move on to digital telephony. How is your equipment taking it? Any problems, over?”

  “No problems, ma’am. Our equipment’s doing fine.”

  “Do you think you can handle more than one call like this at a time, over?”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem, ma’am. Do you want to test it?”

  “If you’re willing. Give us a minute or so, we’ll prepare another transmitter…”

  Trout glanced towards the comms officer, resisting the urge to head over there and look over their shoulder. He turned back to his tablet, going over more reports. There was an analysis on the vessel that Rain had used to approach them yesterday, specifically the speed it was able to reach for such a small vessel to be able to reach them so quickly, as well as about how it had stopped so exactly without visible deceleration thrusters. An update on the QTG readings coming from the planet that read like Hegemony drive systems, confirming they were remaining stationary with respect to the planet’s rotation and that the readings were remaining constant. A report positing that the Kaedekin possessed some sort of compact artificial gravity technology based on the recording of how Rain walked across the hull. An update from the infectious disease lab about their analysis of the bacterial and viral samples they’d received and their progress on making vaccines for them. Another update on their progress in making cultures for the Kaedekin to examine, which involved not only the diseases they had on record, but also the bacteria they were all carrying on their skin, on the off chance that one of them might be lethal to the Kaedekin…

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  “Captain?” At the watch officer’s approach, Trout looked up. “The Kaedekin are asking for you, sir.”

  “Thank you, Kristoffson,” Trout said, rising from his chair and approaching the comms station. One of the communications officers there handed him a discreet headset, and he slipped on the flexible band. The ends covered his ears enough to muffle most sound, and the attached microphone would pick up his voice. Another vacated their seat, and Trout sat down as the camera on the screen in front of him centered his face so that whoever was on the other end would have the illusion of eye contact. The feed from that camera moved to a discreet corner of the screen, while the rest of the screen showed a video feed of an hourglass in front of the vacuum picnic basket, the sands on the top half falling into the bottom half. Even as he watched, the hourglass emptied, and some mechanism caused it to lower down beneath the screens field of view. When it rose up again, the top half was full once more, the fine grains flowing down with fluid-like regularity.

  “The captain is here ma’am,” the comms officer still in contact with the Kaedekin said. “He’s ready for you.”

  “Great! We’re ready too. Oh, before we start, can you ask him if he’s all right with us broadcasting this conversation on our end? We have a lot of really curious people here who’d like to see what our new friends look like, but if the captain isn’t comfortable with it, we understand, over.”

  The comms officer glanced at Trout, who nodded. “Understood, ma’am. The captain is giving his permission, and you should know that we will be recording on our end as well.”

  “Of course, of course! Historians would be really annoyed at us if we didn’t properly document things and provide first party sources, over.” There was that earnest sincerity again.

  “Well, we wouldn’t want to disappoint them,” Trout said. “May I ask why I’m looking at sand falling down?”

  “Oh, our technical officer suggested that a constantly moving object would be best for calibrating the videophony protocols, and it’s a nicer placeholder than just a static image. Give me a moment, please…”

  As Trout watched, the hourglass and picnic basket slid to the side, leaving him staring at a wall painted bright pink, in front of which stood some kind of carving… no, it was a plant of some kind. Trout didn’t get a good look at it before something bright yellow moved in front of the camera’s view.

  A moment later, Trout found himself looking at a young woman.

  A young human woman.

  …

  Probably.

  She looked young enough to be his niece, with vaguely Asian features and wide blue eyes that seemed unnaturally bright. Her short hair was clearly dyed blonde since she had dark eyebrows, which matched the shade of yellow of the vest she was wearing over a crisp white shirt. The collar of the shirt had what were clearly red rank pips with some kind of design on them, though Trout couldn’t make out what it was.

  Her features immediately broke out in a bright, wide smile. “Bawipu guranah weepuh ninibong!” she greeted enthusiastically, and it was the same voice and the same enthusiasm that he’d come to know from the… was she really an alien at all? “Greetings, Captain Trout! Paladin Rain here! It’s nice to see you again! I’m glad we can finally talk outside of a space suit. I have plenty of air today, and I have water!” She held up what was recognizably a very tall coffee mug of some kind. “I can talk for much longer today, and if there’s anything I missed, I can ask someone else on the team to get it for me, over.”

  …

  “Is this… some sort of generated image?” Trout eventually asked.

  “Generated image? What do you mean, over?”

  “Your appearance. Is it… some kind of generated appearance you’re using to hide your real form for some reason? Maybe to try and make me comfortable with something familiar?”

  The smiling face settled into an expression of befuddlement. “No…? Why would I want to do that? That would be deceiving you, and this is a first contact. The only reason someone would want to be deceptive during a first contact would be if they wanted to invade, and we don’t want to invade you, over.”

  With her face visible, the statement was no longer a confusing example of alien logic. It just sounded childish. “So this is really what you look like?”

  “Yes, this is me. Is something wrong, over?”

  “…you don’t need to keep saying ‘over’. We’re not communicating over a single frequency anymore, so you don’t need to tell us when you’re done speaking.”

  “Oh, that’s why you say over?” Rain visibly looked down and seemed to write that down. “We only know about it from your transmissions, so we don’t really know what the origin of it is, ov—er, sorry. Thank you for telling me, I’ll make sure everyone knows.”

  …

  She still sounded so sincere.

  “So, what did you want to talk about today, Captain Trout?” Rain asked. “I have some matters that I’ve been asked to go over with you, but they’re not urgent. We can take care of them later. Yesterday we left off in the middle of talking about the Rangers. Do you want to pick up where we left off?”

  Her smile was completely earnest…

  And yet…

  The Kaedekin were clearly humans. Not some kind of unknown aliens, just… humans. Was ‘Kaedekin’ the name of their polity? Regardless, now that the Kaedekin had shown what they looked like, there was really no more hope that they were aliens, was there? “Rain… are the Kaedekin humans? Are you—” he managed to avoid saying ‘just’, “—colonists from Earth?”

  Rain blinked, looking surprised by the question. “No, of course not. We’re not humans, we’re Kaedekin. And we have no colonists from Earth. According to the transmissions we’ve managed to decipher, humans only began colonizing stars beyond their own approximately four hundred years ago, when you began using star-to-star leyline teleports to move your spaceships. We’d been on Surcease for almost a century by that point, so our civilization definitely predates the beginning of the human astro-colonization period. Ah, an Earth century, just to be clear.”

  Trout stared. “What?”

  Rain blinked. “Oh, I’m sorry, was I speaking too fast? What part do you want me to repeat?”