"I guess they consider it controversial." Jason leaned back against the mast, his expression unhappy. "I'm going to talk money first, even though that wasn't the main reason. They would have had to build a ship. It wouldn't have been as expensive as a colony ship, but it would've been a lot of money. On top of that, when the transmissions from here stopped, they had to wait until the light from your star reached Earth so we could tell if there had been some solar disaster that wiped you out. That took a long time. Years. The sense of urgency was a lot lower by the time Earth saw that nothing had happened that could be spotted from so far off."

"All right," Kira said. "Expensive, and you had to wait. Those weren't the biggest reasons?"

"No." Jason looked at her. "They didn't have the Asaro-Ashmead drive that the ship I came on uses, so the trip here to find out what had happened to you, if there were any survivors, would have taken more than a century. The crew that started out would die along the way, and their children and children's children would be the ones who arrived here, just like on the colony ship. All Earth knew was that whatever had happened to you had hit so suddenly and so completely that none of the status reports had mentioned any problems before they cut off. Whatever had caused that was probably still here. So when the second ship finally got here, they might fall prey to the same thing. The ethics of sending a crew on what seemed to be a one-way suicide mission was bad enough, but sending the unborn children of a crew on a mission like that? Knowing the crew would have to have those kids and raise them knowing that they'd probably be killed by whatever had happened to you guys? How do you decide doing that is okay?"

"Don't say okay," Kira reminded him. She frowned, feeling depressed. "It wouldn't have been. Not if there was every reason to believe they'd die when they got here. Didn't anyone consider the possibility that the crew had deliberately stopped communicating? That they were disobeying their orders and their responsibilities to the passengers?"

"No," Jason said. "It didn't happen anywhere else. Some of that second- and third-generation crew on the ship that came here must have been major sociopaths with mad political skills, but how could anyone tell that from brief status updates? Even now—" He stopped speaking abruptly.

Kira recognized Jason's reaction when he had said too much. "What?"