Returned, Unharmed: A First Contact Thriller

Dara Voss has been salvaging in the asteroid belt for eleven years. She's good at finding things - less good at making them balance against a debt of 680,000 credits that hasn't moved in most of that time. When a routine debris sweep flags an anomalous mass at bearing 227 - Arken composite, three hundred years old, two and a half centuries older than First Contact - she boards it expecting to find her way out of debt. 214 human subjects. 18th-century West Africa. Preserved in an alien cargo hold for three centuries by a system that was still running when Dara found it, patient in the dark. The collection dates to the height of the transatlantic slave trade. The subjects were returned to their lives afterward, their memories of the eighteen days removed so cleanly that no one who survived it ever knew. And the neural tissue those eighteen days had produced - adapted under conditions of extreme and sustained duress - was exactly what an alien civilization needed to build the technology it would one day give humanity as a gift. The clean energy grid that now powers Earth's civilization, keeps its hospitals running, and sustains eight billion lives wasn't a gift. It was a payment.