I’d heard this speech many times. It was one of the reasons I’d urged my boss to come on the expedition in person. My hope was that he’d open up to his peers in a way he never would to me and provide some kind of insight into his xenophobia. As Callum was to Emilja, so Yuri was to Ainsley—and a more paranoid sonofabitch you cannot find.

Kandara regarded Yuri with some surprise. “I don’t see the aggressive side of them. They seem more full-on passive to me.”

“That’s all part of the act. They adapt to circumstances. I don’t blame them; it’s an excellent survival trait, which is exactly what you need if you’re on a voyage to the end of time. Even the Olyix don’t know what they’re going to encounter next, so they have to be ready for anything.”

“Are you saying we’re not seeing the real them?”

“No, quite the opposite. They see us, and adapt themselves to the systems we live by. That is the real them, even though for us it’s looking into a mirror.”

“You, the Sol system, turned them into traders,” Callum said.

“Of course we did,” Yuri said. “They came, they looked around, they saw what they had to do to get the energy they needed to rebuild their antimatter fuel supply—and they did it. No hesitation, no regrets. And to hell with the consequences.”

“And there are consequences to them trading Kcells with us?” Eldlund asked in surprise. “I don’t see how. Kcell treatments have saved the lives of millions of people in the Universal star systems. People who are too poor to afford stem cell printing and cloned organs. That’s the only outrage here.”

“I’m not saying Kcells have been bad for us,” Yuri said. “But the nature of the Olyix, this adaptability, is detrimental when they encounter a species with politics as complex as ours. They lack discrimination. Because they are driven so relentlessly to achieve their own goal, it doesn’t matter to them how they achieve it. They need our money to buy our electricity, so they will adopt our own methodology to obtain it. Any methodology we have, they see an opportunity. Anything else is probably a sin to them.”

“You object to them because they’ve become capitalists?” Eldlund exclaimed.

“No,” Callum taunted. “It’s because they’re better capitalists.”

“You don’t get it,” Yuri said calmly. “They don’t have our moral filter. It doesn’t matter to them what they do to get money, nor the consequences. And there is an awful lot of money involved with supplying the Salvation of Life with energy. That’s why we have to watch them very closely.”

“Money is always going to distort everything,” Alik said. “Nothing new in that. Greed is a constant. That just makes them more human, you ask me.”