“So what do we do if they come out and welcome us as liberators and shit like that?” one of the team asked.

“Keep it friendly and businesslike,” Queson told them. “If there’s anybody around, they know where everything of interest to us is. It’s a lot easier to have it given to you than to take it. If nobody is stupid then they don’t have to know until the very last moment that we’re not leaving with anybody we didn’t bring. Understand?”

The tall, thin man in the rust colored e-suit who moved to take the point nodded, still chuckling. “All heart for sure,” he muttered as he checked the charge on his pistol.

The fact that no alien civilizations had been discovered didn’t mean that there wasn’t a lot of alien life, and they all understood that. Any world that was habitable by humans tended to be inhabited by something, and the more water present as a liquid the more likely that was. Much of the life that had been discovered wasn’t very smart, but it was astonishingly dangerous. All the more dangerous because until you met it you often didn’t know anything about it at all, and after you met it you hoped you could figure it out before it got you.

They weren’t there to be gotten, but to get.

In the old days, they would identify themselves as being in the salvage business, and salvage was in fact what they did. With few factories capable of the quality of work that used to be available before the Great Silence had cut off the children of humanity from their roots, this was how you did things. Groups could make a living finding one of the lost colonies, hoping against hope that it had failed and that everyone who’d lived there was long dead, and then stripping it of everything of value before anybody else found it and selling it as best they could.