Chapter 13
9 pm Saturday

General Davis stood in the conference room and looked at the pictures of the crime scene. "Is this even possible?" He asked.

Blake just shook her head. "Maybe. I don't know. We have a record of Ms. Shepherd showing the first contact team a video of the Ambassador destroying an enemy battle cruiser, but we don't have a record of the actual video. During the time she's been here she hasn't shown any tendency toward violence at all. We don't know for certain but we don't have any other explanation. But even if she didn't have diplomatic immunity this would be a clear case of self defense."

"Understood. What are the chances of their recovery before the next courier?"

"When is the next courier due?"

"Four days."

Oh shit. "I honestly don't know." Blake said. "The only witnesses we have are seven and ten and they're traumatized. The two suspects we have aren't talking."

"They'd better." The General said. "If she did this I do not want her big brother coming back to this planet pissed."

Hotch was about to say that pulling clearance wasn't good enough, not here, not now, but before he could the door opened and the men came back, dragging Spencer and Sarah's limp bodies between them.

Eva just smiled as they went past. "How long do you think they'll be out?" She asked Morgan.

"Another hour, maybe two." He said.

"We can do that."

Her confidence wasn't bravado, Hotch realized. Eva honestly believed that a petite, delicate, seemingly fragile woman in lacy pink lingerie would somehow be able to get them out of there.

"Morgan." JJ said quietly.

Morgan was in the middle of pacing his cell when he looked over and saw her and Will. "JJ. Jesus." He crouched down to be at her level. "Oh JJ, sweetheart, I am so sorry."

"Just don't look." She said as she curled into an even tighter ball.

"How is Will doing?" Hotch asked her.

"I can't tell if he's asleep or in shock." JJ said. "I think it's pretty bad." She looked over at Morgan. "Look, I get it. I know you're not supposed to talk about it. But they have Henry and Jack and I don't know how we're going to get out of here to find them." She was trying not to cry but it was so hard.

"Protocol 3372?" Hotch asked again.

Eva looked at Morgan and shrugged. "He's not my general." She said. "And there are kids in trouble. Yeah." She said to Hotch. "I'm not from around here." She pointed up. Straight up, Hotch realized, up toward the stars. "Neither is my girl over there."

"And you can't get us out?"

"Unfortunately no."

"You just stopped a taser."

She shrugged. "That's just body armor. I forgot I had it on. Sarah can get us out, as soon as she wakes up. She's getting a habit of sleeping through a crisis."

"How?" Hotch asked.

"Remember that weaponised seed stock Blake was talking about?" Morgan said. He nodded pointedly at Sarah.

For a moment Hotch didn't understand. But then it clicked and things started to clear. "Not agriculture. Gametes. Egg and sperm samples. Seed stock for a population."

"Women where we're from don't have an easy time carrying to term even under the best conditions." Eva said. "Over the past generation we lost our planet, our people have been forced into refugee camps and our women have had to go to war, breaking a long held taboo that was there for a reason. Our prenatal mortality rate got up to eighty percent. You don't have it that high anywhere on this planet. We were in danger of going extinct. So one of our supposed allies, the Eridians, offered to let us store what we needed to on their planet. We created a genetic bank so that we could get sturdier volunteers from other planets to help us keep our numbers up, and so that when the war was over and we could settle a new planet we'd have the genetic diversity to rebuild our population."

"But Blake said there was a problem."

"Yeah. The Eridians weren't as trustworthy as we thought. Problem was nearly all the people who knew that were long gone when they came to us. Only one left from our original government was my uncle and he was here, trapped. He knew we couldn't trust them so when he and King Ehawk and your Ambassador went back they started looking into the program. Turns out the Eridans had been creating embryos from our stocks, trying to find our Noble lines. But they had to destroy them to test them." Her voice grew very quiet. "Our children are all we have left."

"I understand. So you're moving the stocks here?"

"You people feel the same way about children that we do. And the Eridans don't even know this planet exists. They're safer here. And we'll give you whatever you want in exchange for looking after them for us."

"You shouldn't have to." Hotch said. "Weaponisation. I assume that has something to do with the Noble lines?"

"About a thousand years ago King Gerand the Fourth realized that our species was evolving. Some of our people were becoming vastly more intelligent, and were developing special abilities. He decided to encourage that evolution, so he declared anyone showing those traits to be a member of the nobility, and in exchange for the land and money that went with the titles they had to agree to only marry or allow their children to marry within the Noble class." Eva smiled. "I know that kind of social engineering is taboo on your planet, but it worked on ours. At least until the Olan attacked, the Nobles who survived the initial attack were the first to go to the gallows."

"And Sarah's a noble?" Hotch asked.

"Of the royal line. Her brother left her here to protect the children. I'm her Companion, but that's even more complicated."

"I thought you said the nobility can only marry other nobles?" JJ asked.

"That's right."

"So why is she dating Spence?"

"Because your people have been evolving too."