>>5682262you get your ship and such ready and clean as can be. you gave away one of your dress uniforms to young queen, so, your work uniform should probably do fine. nothing is doing anything overtly illegal (speaking of, will be hard to explain B6, but that's a later problem).
you set course.
humanity, you reflect, you have not seen every peak and valley of humanity now, but you have a good idea, having lived as a captain within its ranks. high tech was achieved, spacefaring was gotten to, and Sol, at this point, was full colonized, every planet, with minor populations on those planets already diverging into abhuman strains (by means artificial or natural), some of whom, here and there, dot your crew. humanity has not decided whether or not to be racist towards them.
your tech is sleek. it is all basically designed to be sleek and weird and luxurious and unlike the limited old tech that came before truly, finally leaving earth in ships, full of people, and life. they make historical dramas sometimes about the colonization of the Sol planets. lots of people die in them. from gruesome ways, so, your species has learned a lot. you are maybe the third or fourth stock of humanity lucky enough to expand out in a colony, and the first to be outside home doing so, truly.
you could, you reflect, seriously sell a human ship as some sort of luxury cruise liner to these other species. the warp drive to get here and a thousand other space technologies being in advance of them, and designed aesthetically to boot. your species fought and lived and died through its cyberpunk ages, after all, this is no biggy.
if *no one* gets to go to space in a luxury cruise liner, why even bother?
the dark side to this, you reflect, though, is that many parts of the worlds of Sol remain in poverty. the wealth is not equal. nor is it all gained nicely. you are riding a golden chariot when beggars on europa or the slums of mars cannot afford to eat. such has it always been
humanity is but a seed caught in the dirt, still to its nature.
speaking of, signals records a signal far out at the system edge, the stirring of a warp jump from a human drive, but only its stirrings. something is making it not arrive in time, despite that, really it should. you don't think it's going to arrive intact or properly. the warp drive has consistently been the most untested technology on humanities vessels, at this point
your ambassador's vessel might not arrive in one piece. you need to put the gas on to the arrival point. and prepare emergency crews. fuck, this is one of the "worst case scenarios" written down
