“All right,” Ironsides said, folding her arms. “Captain Cobb is here. Can we talk now?”

I held up a finger. It might have been petty of me, but it felt really good to make Ironsides wait. Besides, there was someone else who deserved to be here before I explained.

As we waited, I reached for the radio at my side. “M-Bot,” I said. “Everything all right?”

“I’m trying not to be offended by how the engineers in this hangar are looking at me,” he said. “They seem overeager to rip me apart. But so far, nobody has tried anything.”

“That ship is DDF—” Ironsides began.

“That ship,” I said, “will fry all his own systems if you try breaking into him. The DDF will get his tech, but it will be on our terms.”

The way she looked—red-faced—when I said it was also extremely satisfying. But she didn’t challenge me any further.

Finally the door opened again, and Jorgen entered. He was actually smiling, and it occurred to me that the expression—while pleasant—didn’t really suit him. He just looked more like himself when he was being serious.

He wasn’t the one we’d been waiting for, however. Instead, it was the lanky young man Jorgen had been sent to fetch. Rig grinned like a fool as he stepped into the room, then he blushed as the flightleaders and admirals parted for him, saluting. Though Ironsides was angry that Rig and I hadn’t turned the ship in immediately, most seemed to agree that when working with an insane AI that threatened to destroy itself, Rig had performed admirably in getting technology to the DDF.

“Now will you talk?” Ironsides demanded.

“The Krell are not what we think,” I said. “My ship downloaded some of their databases, and discovered what happened before our ancestors landed here on Detritus. There was a war. A vast intergalactic one. Humans against aliens.”

“Against the Krell,” Ironsides said.

“There were no Krell at the start of it,” I said. “Just us versus the galaxy. And humankind lost. The victors were a coalition of aliens who, as best M-Bot and I can tell, considered humankind too brutal, too uncivilized, and too aggressive to be allowed to be part of the intergalactic community.

“They demanded that all human fleets, independent or not, surrender to their authority. Our ancestors, on the Defiant and its small fleet, considered themselves innocent. They weren’t part of the war. But when they refused to turn themselves in, the alien coalition sent a group to capture or contain them. That is what we call the Krell.”

I closed my eyes. “They cornered us. And—after a conflict on board the Defiant—my great-grandmother brought us here, to Detritus. A planet we knew about, but which had been abandoned centuries before.

“The Krell followed us, and set up a station to watch us once we crashed. They’re not murderous aliens. They’re prison guards. A force designed to keep humankind trapped here, as some of the aliens are absolutely sure we will try to conquer the galaxy if we’re ever allowed to get back into space.