DATE: Year 488-B, Sol 369

  LOCATION: Sagan City 5 (Nemesis)

  The Sagan City ships that arrived at the brown dwarf Nemesis hundreds of years earlier now orbited it like satellites. Early plans to try to ignite the brown dwarf and get the hydrogen fusion process started to create a second sun and a permanent power source failed.

  The Saganites had set up several, giant slingshot-like devices to capture large debris from the Oort Cloud and hurl it at relativistic speeds at the brown dwarf. They knocked it around in its orbit but could not add enough mass or kinetic energy to ignite hydrogen fusion.

  Instead, the Saganite prediction analysts found that the chances of an Oort Cloud remnant of civilization-ending size impacting Earth had increased ten-fold. It was still low enough to be negligible, and was not worth considering in the Saganites long-term planning on how to retake the Earth. For a few years immediately after the Rip, the Saganites had tried to figure out what happened on Earth, and then how it might be possible to resettle it.

  They settled on the conclusion that the only reasonable goal was the original one of the Sagan Charter, to get to Alpha Centauri.

  They did it in stages, not sure of the next step after taking each one. First they went to Jupiter. They spent centuries there before taking off for the Kuiper Belt, and then even later finally completing the zipline to Nemesis.

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  Igniting Nemesis was considered more important than starting the zipline to Alpha Centauri, though they sent one of the Sagan Cities as a generation ship to Alpha Centauri. It stopped communicating with the Nemesis Saganites less than an Earth year after the death of the last second generation crew had been reported.

  The Nemesis Saganites similarly lost interest in particularly communicating with the Kuiper Saganites, let alone those who decided to stay on Jupiter, or the rest of the humans in the inner system.

  The edge dragons had been an unexpected problem. The Europa traveling aliens arrived at some point to tell them the zipline from the Kuiper belt had been attracting the creatures, but the Nemesis Saganites wrote it off as a trick of projection by the aliens.

  They’d found the edge dragons eating through the zipline about a year ago and found that the only way to get rid of them was to collapse it. It was a small sacrifice, there was limited use in contacting the other Saganites anymore.

  When they got the message from Arrokoth, the Nemesis Saganites didn’t know what to do with it. It seemed so irrelevant. The information about the edge dragons would’ve been more useful if it could’ve come instantaneously. They handled them on their own. The aliens didn’t concern them. The Jupiter Saganites wanted the Nemesis Saganites to return.

  The Europa aliens, as they reported to Nemesis, were ready to cooperate on technological advancements and social control. The time to reclaim Earth could be coming.

  The Nemesis Saganites didn’t care about that. They were still aiming for Alpha Centauri.

  The message meant nothing to them.

  The update meant less.