“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.”
Alik looked from me to Yuri. Clearly not a man used to being told
“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.”
“And she was there on Bronkal, eliminating any evidence of Baptiste snatching low-visibility people—for no reason we could ever find,” Yuri said. “Which is an even stronger association to what’s going down here, now that we know Soćko was shipped directly from there to the ship.”