The following exchange began circulating on Belt Times comment channels within days of the Callisto no-fly declaration. Authenticity has not been officially confirmed or denied by UN Solar Affairs or Pathfinder Fleet Command. If genuine, it captures ship-to-ship communication between Commander Evelyn Wu (Shennong, holding at Ganymede) and Fleet Commander Rosalind Kovács (Pathfinder, inbound from Callisto), transmitted near-instantaneously given both vessels’ position within the Jovian system — no meaningful lag, unlike the Ceres reporting channel.
WU: Confirmed you’re inbound. We’ve got a berth cleared and resupply staged the moment you’re in range. How’s the crew.
KOVÁCS: Tired. Quiet. Nobody’s said much since we sealed the site. I keep waiting for someone to crack a joke and nobody’s cracking one.
WU: That bad.
KOVÁCS: It’s not bad, it’s just — Europa was ours, Evelyn. Same DNA, same chirality, same everything down to the sugar. You could look at that thing under a scope and feel like you were looking at a very distant cousin. This isn’t that. Opposite-handed, top to bottom, dozens of species doing it. Whatever that is, it isn’t related to anything I’ve ever studied. It’s not even built out of the same kind of molecule I could digest if I had to.
WU: Meaning what, practically.
KOVÁCS: Meaning if that stuff got loose in an ecosystem with our chirality, nothing here knows how to eat it, and it doesn’t know how to eat anything here either. No predators, no competition, no immune response either direction. It’s not dangerous the way a toxin is dangerous. It’s dangerous the way an unbalanced ledger is dangerous. Nobody’s checked it in centuries and now it’s sitting right next to the account it was never supposed to touch.
WU: You think that’s why the no-fly order came down that fast.
KOVÁCS: I think Liu’s office didn’t need CAI to explain it twice. I gave the order to stop drilling before anyone on Ceres even heard it happened. Whatever authorization came back, it just caught up to where we already were.
WU: For what it’s worth — good call. Nobody’s going to second-guess you sealing that site on your own signature.
KOVÁCS: I know. Doesn’t make the two hours waiting to hear it back any shorter.
WU: Well. Come sit still for a while. We’ve got the berth, we’ve got the supply, and Boreas is going to need everyone caught up before she’s Saturn-bound. You get to be somebody else’s problem to resupply for once instead of the other way around.
KOVÁCS: [laughs] That’s the first genuinely appealing sentence anyone’s said to me in a week. Give me a day out from Ganymede and I’ll take you up on all of it.
WU: We’ll have the lights on. Safe approach, Rosalind.
KOVÁCS: Copy that. See you on the other side of this.
No further exchange in this leaked segment. Belt Times has declined to name a source for the recording.