“So what do you think of the ship?” Cathérine asked. She sat down in the chair behind the desk in her office and looked at the tall alien. The other ambassadors and envoys had all been shuffled off with Prakoso. He’d been more than happy to pump them for information, and she had taken the opportunity to take the Unity diplomat aside for a little one on one talk. He sat down awkwardly, and Cathérine clenched her jaw when she saw him shrink by a whole foot to fit in the chair better. The Merilim ability to change their shape didn’t seem to have any limits she’d been able to suss out. She hoped their Cultural Exchange Program would include some biological information that her own team of scientists could have a little rummage through.

“It is a beautiful piece of engineering, Captain,” Proteus said with reverence. She wondered if that was manufactured. Even though he was not even a native speaker of, well, speech, the alien was a gifted diplomat. But she didn’t like the idea that she might be condescended to. He seemed to pick up on it and folded two of his hands on his lap. His two other arms merged with his body with a sort of sickening grace. “We have the policy not to…” He seemed to be looking for a word for a moment, and his collar expelled a little puff of vapour. “Snoop.” She cocked her head, waiting for him to elaborate. “Once a society reaches a certain technological stage, we feel it is, hmmm, detrimental to future interactions if we keep watching.”

“But you’ve clearly kept an eye on us for some time, Ambassador,” she said. “Where do you draw that line?” He made the little laugh-hissing sound in response. “Tea?” He raised his hand as a clear ‘No, thank you’. She didn’t know if he didn’t drink tea, couldn’t drink tea, or simply didn’t like tea. Could he even drink?

“It’s taken us some time, of course, but once a species looks to the stars, we stop looking as intently and we… listen,” he said. “We read your published papers, we listen to your radio broadcasts and watch your news.”

“Oh, goodness,” Cathérine said with a little smirk, “I’m so sorry. I can barely stand to watch television myself.” She got another chuckle out of Proteus with that.

“Yes, well, any large enough society has managed to invent some form of reality TV. It seems to be a fact of the universe,” he said with a little smile, and Cathérine couldn’t help but take a liking to him. His gentle baritone was very soothing, even if she worried that that, too, was manufactured for exactly that purpose. “But yes, I have never seen the kind of faster-than-light drive your ship has, because it wasn’t public information. We think it would have been… bad for diplomatic engagements if, during our first interaction, we revealed that we knew all of your military secrets.”

“Do you?”

“No. That is, I believe, my point.”

“Right.” Cathérine looked at him for a moment, got up, and made herself a cup of coffee. Not that she didn’t like tea herself. Tea was a drink for the distinguished Captain, alcohol one for the reckless one, and coffee one for the one who had pulled an all-nighter before the most important diplomatic encounter in human history. “I’m glad you like the ship, then. Anything in particular stand out?”

“Well, the drive, yes. What did you call it?”

“The SA-Drive,” she said helpfully as the water started to boil. She made sure to face him the entire time, she didn’t want to seem rude. “If you want more information, I can definitely introduce you to someone from engineering.”

“That will not be necessary at the moment, although I do believe I would like to hear more about the theory at some point. The concept of shifting space around the ship to circumvent the light-speed-limit is…” He smiled warmly this time. “Mind-boggling. Truly.” Cathérine blinked a few times.

“You don’t use something similar?”

“It is the first I’ve heard of a drive like it, at the very least,” Proteus said. Picking up on the second, unspoken part of her question, he continued. “While I obviously can not go into too much detail, most members of the First Federation have found different ways of traversing the stars. The Unity, for one, uses stable wormholes. We have since we first traveled through space almost… two million years ago. It is… elegant, we feel.” He looked a little smug. His boast about both his species’ age and their technology didn’t escape her, and Cathérine detected a hint of racial pride, and maybe even a sense of rivalry with another species. “The Deep Khatunate, although they keep a lot of their technology very secret, has informed us that they move through a separate dimensional plane. Its distances seem to be almost arbitrary, and they are, thus far, the only society that has been capable of navigating it.” Then he made a sound. As Cathérine poured the coffee, she studied the alien. From the sound of it, Proteus had clicked his tongue in a noise of… disapproval. Was there some bad blood between the Unity and the Khatunate? Something she’d have to keep an eye out for. 

“I take it this dimension is not easy to reach?” Proteus shook his head and shrugged. 

“We stay away from it. It feels like a volatile way to travel, but the Khatunate has made it work.” He waited patiently as Cathérine sat down across from him again. “The UHN travels… in a complicated manner. Personally, on an individual level, I have trouble wrapping my head around it, although there are those within the Unity that understand it, so if you give me some time I could give you a more in-depth explanation.” He’d already given Cathérine a brief summation of his connection to the rest of his species. A species of telepaths with a sort of selective sliding-scale hive-mind was fascinating, and more than a little intimidating. 

“That won’t be necessary. Just your understanding, if you’re willing to keep going.”

“Of course. Well, as we understand, many species within the UHN travel in real-time, through space, at about twenty-five percent the speed of light,” he said. Cathérine frowned.

“But that would mean space travel takes…

“Decades,” he said, nodding. “Correct. And yet, they have built up something of a stellar society. Curious, no?” He gave her another slight smile. “The species that Doctor Hyslan is a member of seems to have developed a technology that allows them to… revert their ships to a previous moment in time, but not place.” Cathérine blinked. But that was… “When a ship has finished its journey, it moves backwards through time to the moment it first departed on the trip. All wear-and-tear, all damage to machinery due to continued use is undone, and, from the perspective of an observer, the ship has made the trip instantaneously.” 

“But…” she said, and then stopped. The implications of this kind of technology were almost impossible to comprehend. 

“Yes, I agree,” he said. “We feel much the same way. However, the technology seems to have some hard limits, and the UHN appears to be pursuing peace at every turn. It is, nevertheless, worrying.” He waited a moment while Cathérine sipped her coffee. If asked, she would have told someone in her crew it was black and strong, because there were some ridiculous social conventions surrounding coffee, but, truth be told, she liked her soft and sweet. 

“What about Rep and his species?” she asked. There would be time for her scientists to go through everything she’d been told later. Right now, she wanted to ask questions. 

“How Rep travels through space is unknown,” Proteus said. “He appears when he says he will. As for his species…” He seemed to mull his words for a moment, blinking slowly, as if looking for the right words. “He is a species of… few. Or of trillions, depending on how you look at it.” 

“He is an artificial intelligence,” Cathérine concluded. She was capable of picking up on context clues. “Processes running in tandem.”

“Yes, he is most definitely that,” Proteus said, “but he is not the only one. He is emergent, not manufactured, and his dominion over his region of space is absolute. Trespassing is met with a stern warning. Continued offense is replied to with extreme hostility. We simply don’t know what he does within his systems, but he does not seem to desire to expand, except when his… nation does.”

“His nation?” Cathérine sipped her coffee again. 

“He has become something of a safe-haven for other artificial life-forms like himself, although there appears to be a sort of bar that needs to be met before they are accepted in the nation. A certain… size. A single life-form, a ‘unit’ like you or myself, would be shown the door. Rep seems to accept only society-sized entities.” Proteus blinked. “There are, as far as we know, only five like him, Rep included.”

“Very strange,” Cathérine said, and stood up, walking over to the window. She was tired. From sleep deprivation, sure, but there was an element of social exhaustion, too. She’d risked a lot in a short amount of time and she was begging to feel it. She hadn’t had the time to let her brain spool down. “Do you know who I am, Proteus?” she asked, not looking at him. She saw him nod out of the corner of her eye.

“I do, Captain. Decorated war hero. Captain of the SS Sollipsis.” There was a little pause, and then a playful tone snuck into his voice. “The first human being to meet another intelligent species.” She nodded. 

“Do you know what that means?” She turned to look at him. He cocked his head. Clearly, he could tell she was going somewhere with this, but he couldn’t tell where, and he didn’t seem to know how to respond. She walked back over to the table and put her cup down, leaning on the hard plastic of the desk.

“It means I’m a gambler, Ambassador Proteus,” she said. “I simply don’t know if the best way to dissolve an interplanetary conflict between two species is to take a nuke to the forehead. Honestly, it sounds almost suicidal.” She waited to see if he reacted in any way, but he simply listened. “But I could see the edges of your puzzle. I saw the dealer, and when you know there’s a dealer, you know he has a hand to play, and suddenly it becomes very important to stop looking at the cards and to start looking at the person who dealt them.”

“I am afraid I do not --” Proteus began, but she interrupted him.

“I gambled, Ambassador Proteus,” she said. “I gambled the lives of everyone on board this ship, because I could tell what kind of players I was facing, and I took a risk -- calculated, but a risk nonetheless -- that you were the kind of dealer who would set up a game like this in the first place.” Her voice was low, and it was only because of the excellent insulation in the room that she was still easily audible. She leaned across the table to look him in his big, alien eyes. “And you knew this was no risk, because you’d been cheating. I don’t like tests, Ambassador Proteus, but I like games.” She straightened up. “You may have been making tests and games for species like us for a long time, Ambassador. But clearly you have a lot to learn about cheating.” She sat down. 

“I do not follow.”

“If you want to find something out about us, Proteus,” she said, “either you ask, or you get better at playing the game. I’m almost… offended, that it took a game of charades before you took us seriously enough to talk to us. We might not have a linked consciousness, or a galaxy-spanning network of artificial intelligence; we might be a young species, incomprehensibly juvenile by your standards, but we have been playing games for the entirety of our existence, and I think it would be in both our interests if you realized that.”

Proteus nodded slowly. “I think I understand. You are not threatening us, are you?”

“No, I’m not,” she said with a little smirk. “Would you like me to?”

Proteus returned the smile, and for a moment, there was a genuine connection between the two species. “No, I’m not sure I’d come out on top in that encounter.”

“Good,” Cathérine said, and smiled. This diplomacy thing was easier than she’d thought.