“Unless it wipes us out. Then the guys sent to find us get taken out, and the guys who get sent in after that…What’s the cutoff? Team twenty?”

“There is no link with solnet. However, the satellites are keeping watch. If the mission’s G8Turing spots any trouble, then the appropriate protocols will be followed.”

“Great,” Alik grunted. “And we’re still racing away at walking pace.”

“You were aware of the risk before we started.”

“Risk, yeah. Your paranoia, not so much.”

“We have to guarantee the safety of our entire species. That is no small obligation.”

“Come on. If you can travel between stars, you aren’t doing it for the glory of the empire. There’s no such thing.”

“Our own history and rationale cannot be used as a template for analyzing the motives of an extraterrestrial species,” Yuri said levelly. “The alien ship was probably on some kind of scout mission—an exploration and assessment maybe, the equivalent of this very assessment mission. Whatever the exact classification, they stole humans to examine them. Already that puts them into an antagonistic classification.”

“Do we know they were stolen?” Alik challenged. “Hell, they could have been fleeing some catastrophe or war, and the aliens were doing these people a favor. We’re eighty-nine light-years from Earth, right? So if this ship was flying below light speed, it could have left Earth at anytime in the last five hundred years. There was some pretty bad shit going on then; not our finest era.”

“Fleeing what?”

“Second World War, for starters. Think on it. You’re stuck in the blitz in London, and some strange dude offers you a way out. The chance for you and a few others to start a new life on a new world. The only price is that you can’t ever come back. You know you’d take that offer. We’ve got close to twenty terraformed planets now, every one of which cost us the biggest financial and political effort our species has ever known. If we’d spent half that much fixing Earth, we’d have us a genuine paradise. But no, getting a second chance is the greatest human dream and delusion we have. It even outranks religion.”

“Benign aliens intervening to save us?” Yuri sneered. “What’s that, second on the wish list?”

Alik spread his hands wide. “Then why are humans on board?”

“We don’t have nearly enough information yet to confirm the intent.”

“Hell, man, I know that. I’m offering up possibilities, that’s all. Thinking wide. That’s why we’re all here, aren’t we? Everything is up for consideration.”

“So which do you think it is?” Kandara challenged. “You put up a good case for them being benign. Are they saving worthy people from Earth’s brutality, or are they hostile imperialists, capturing specimens for the all-time rectal probing record in their laboratory?”

Alik gave her a quick salute. “I’m prepared for it to be the hostile, but intellectually I’m kinda thinking it’s unlikely.”

“Why?” Yuri said, his voice sharpening.