“As you wish,” Markus said, quickly.  There was no point in arguing.  Besides, they weren’t trying to confiscate his recordings.  “Do you think the aliens wanted us here?”

“It's a possibility,” the XO conceded.  “If they believed we survived New Russia, there aren’t many other places we could go.  But why?”

“The POWs,” Markus suggested.  “They could have been conditioned ...”

“We thought of that,” the XO said.  Markus let out a sigh of relief.  “For the moment, they will remain confined.”

He smiled, rather dryly.  “Do you have any other questions?”

“Just one,” Markus said.  “Where are we going next?”

The XO hesitated, clearly weighing the question in the balance, then shrugged.  “There are a handful of systems with tramlines that lead back to human space,” he said.  “We’ll pick our way through them, trying to avoid contact with the aliens – if possible.”

Markus frowned.  “We’re not heading further into alien space?”

“Not yet,” the XO said.  “We need to report in to Earth and ...”

He broke off as the alert howled, bringing the ship to battlestations.  “I need to go to the CIC,” he said.  “You get back to your compartment.  Now.”

“Yes, sir,” Markus said.

***

“Apparently,” Gladys said, “they were all naked.  The aliens and prisoners alike, I mean.”

Kurt rolled his eyes.  Gladys was older than Rose, younger than him ... and queen of the chatterboxes.  When she wasn't flying her starfighter or resting, she was chatting to everyone from junior crewmen to Royal Marines.  It made her very well informed of what was actually going on, although she heard too many rumours for them all to be true.  Kurt rather doubted that anyone would have the nerve to organise a striptease onboard ship with the XO on the prowl.

“Maybe they were molested,” one of the older male pilots grunted.  “Wasn't there a film about Mars needing women?”

“That was about the shortage of women on the first colony,” Rose reminded him.  “There was an accident and twenty-seven colonists were killed, twenty-three of them women.  It had Jeremy Underline in his first starring role.  And Nasty Mildew.”

Kurt smiled, despite the tension of being so close to Rose and yet pretending that everything was normal.  Jeremy Underline was a heartthrob movie star; Penny had spent a year with her room utterly plastered in pictures of the handsome actor.  It was odd to realise that Rose would have fancied him too ... but then, she was only five years older than Penny.  Nasty Mildew was worth watching, he recalled, yet the general theory at the time had been that she didn't really exist in reality.  The unions might have objected to VR actors – they took work from real actors, they felt – but surely no living human could have boobs that big and still walk upright.

“There was a great nude scene,” the male pilot said.  “I remember it well ...”