Alik looked from me to Yuri. Clearly not a man used to being told no. “I’ll give it a day,” he said. “See if Soćko comes out of it. But after that, I have to file a report no matter what.”

“I’ll tell Sutton and Bee to have the Trail Ranger ready for you to go,” I assured him.

“Which brings us back to what the bloody hell is going on,” Callum said. “The aliens are watching us; they’re taking us to experiment on. Why?”

“It’s obviously an intelligence gathering mission,” Kandara said. “They’re learning our weaknesses. That can only have one outcome.”

“No way,” I said. “There’s no such thing as interstellar war. There is no conceivable reason for it. Once a species gets off its birth world, it effectively has infinite resources. It wants for nothing. Total war is something that belongs to history for anyone who can reach orbit and beyond.”

“They’re alien,” Jessika said. “Who knows what their motivations are? Like Callum said, we’re probably quite frightening to a progressive, peaceful species.”

“Taking people apart,” Alik butted in loudly, the chocolate sloshing perilously close to the rim of his mug. “That ain’t exactly what I’d call progressive, lady!”

“Hitler wasn’t short of resources,” Loi said. “Not to begin with. World War Two was an ideological war at heart, a crusade to impose Nazi imperialism on the rest of the world. Same goes for the Cold War which followed, with its capitalism versus communism.”

Eldlund gave him a taunting smile. “Well, thank heavens those economic theories both lost.”

Loi replied with a contemptuous finger.

“Do you believe the builders of this ship are the ones?” Callum asked. He was staring directly at Yuri.

“It’s starting to look that way.”

“The one what?” Jessika quizzed.

“We’ve all experienced it,” Yuri said. “That’s why we were chosen to interpret this. Though I have to admit, Soćko came as a big surprise to me. Didn’t see that coming.”

“Experience?” Alik clicked his fingers. “Ah, right: we’ve all had experiences which didn’t quite add up, somehow.”

“Yes,” Yuri said, “and those personal cases of ours are the tip of the iceberg. We’ve been analyzing similar incidents for a while now, especially those with critical defense issues.”

Kandara gave me a shrewd look. “I thought I was here for my professional expertise.”

“That was a bonus,” I told her. “You and Callum both encountered Cancer, who had been contracted on a sabotage mission that could have crippled the primary astromanufacturing capability at Delta Pavonis.”

“What’s the connection between that and this situation?”

“Defense,” Yuri said flatly. “If Sol and the settled systems are attacked, Bremble would be essential to build—well, battleships, orbital fortress stations, everything we need to protect ourselves from an invasion.”

“New York’s shields,” Alik said quietly. “She was going for those.”