Outside the Trail Rover, Nkya’s landscape was turning darker. The long screes of sandy regolith we traversed were now as black as volcanic dust. And maybe that’s what the stuff actually was; I’m no geologist.

Callum appeared midmorning and gave the coffee machine a thorough workout. He and Yuri gave each other a curt nod. Their war wasn’t yet over and probably never would be, but the truce was holding.

Alik went and sat next to Yuri. For a moment they both looked out of the window as we passed the scarlet strobe of a beacon post. The intrusive light caught their faces, shading them both a strange bloodred, its time-lapse flashes pulling the shadows out of hooded eyes like dramatic tears.

“So if after considered analysis we declare the alien ship hostile, what happens?” Alik asked. “Are we carrying a nuclear capability?”

“Our security drones can handle a high level of aggression,” Yuri told him. “If the spaceship becomes actively belligerent, they will contain it while we retreat.”

“Retreat in what?”

Yuri frowned, as if he’d misheard. “In this, of course.”

“Jeez, you call this a getaway car?”

“The alien ship is isolated. It doesn’t pose a threat to anything except the immediate vicinity. If that happens, we can return in a more forceful mode.”

“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?”