“We expecting of your acceptance of our conditionals within 10,000 of your seconds. Vronel out.”

Well this was a pickle.

“Kaine, you can’t seriously send 40 of these innocent people out there to… who knows what they would do to them over there!” Arni looked at me like I was some kind of monster.

“Oh Arni. Do you really think I would do that? No, I have a better idea. Think about the way they phrased the request.”

He raised his eyebrows at me. “So, what? They want family units. What is that supposed to mean?”

I smiled at him. Sometimes Arni was so precious. “Mr Vronel didn’t specify that they needed to be human family units.”

As realization dawned on Arni, I left him scratching his head and dashed down the main corridor to our own ships entertainment sector.

The Simulatron contained a number of Constructs that I hoped I could replicate in a realistic enough way for our captors.The copies were good enough to fool most humans, but hyper-advanced aliens? I wasn’t so sure.

“Let’s see if they buy this.”