Alik’s hand shot out, pointing at random. “Did you even see what they did to those poor bastards? They dissolved them! They dumped humans into some kind of alien version of acid, or something, and dissolved them! What’s left is being taken back home to be torture-experimented on. That is a fucking threat, you dumbass hippie! You got kids, right? Suppose you found one of them on board—no arms, no legs, their goddamned eyes ripped out. And that’s just the start; fuck knows what else would’ve happened to them if this ship hadn’t fallen out of the wormhole? That could be you and your family in there, asshole!”

For once Alik’s neck and jaw muscles were flexing. Loi and Eldlund were regarding him in concern.

“Their ethics might not match ours,” Callum said. “They are alien, after all. But they haven’t been overtly aggressive. That has to mean something.”

Alik snorted in contempt and turned to Yuri. “I need to talk to my people.”

Yuri and I exchanged a slightly guilty look. “There are no direct comms with solnet,” I said. “That was a major part of Alpha Defense’s quarantine protocols.”

“Oh, come on.” Alik’s voice dropped an octave to a bass purr, worldly-wise and oh-so-reasonable. “There’s got to be some emergency line out, right?”

“No,” I told him. “There really isn’t.”

“Jesus H. Christ. You are shitting me!”

“That’s got to be the AI safeguard,” Callum said. “Am I right?”

“Yeah,” I conceded.

“The what?” Alik asked angrily.

“The ship we’ve found is from an alien race which, if not actively hostile, is certainly unsympathetic to humans,” Yuri said. “Suppose that frozen brain-captain thing had been warm and running active routines, or it had an electronic AI like our Turings? If we had a link back to solnet, it could download itself into our networks; multiply itself a thousand times a second. The potential damage it could inflict is impossible to calculate.”

“Je-zus,” Alik wheezed. “That is one sonofabitch paranoia you’ve got going there.”

“No,” Yuri said levelly, “it’s a very sensible precaution. Especially now I’ve seen what we’re dealing with.”

“But the aliens who built that ship are already in Sol, or one of our star systems,” Alik countered. “They have been for decades, and they’re smart enough to hide a fucking wormhole terminus from us. If they wanted to crash solnet, they’d have done it by now.”

“We know that now,” I said. “But we didn’t when we set up the research base and started investigating. Deciding to allow a direct connection to solnet is one of the decisions you are here to assess. And we do still have the question of who or what opened the ship’s airlock.”

“Yeah, right,” Alik said grudgingly.

“But I can offer you the Trail Ranger to drive you back to the portal.”