A second team led by Iris with Kaede and Martyn was also now in negotiation with the separatists. They still weren’t big on leaving or rejoining the other colonists, but they had committed to going forward with the idea of managing the planet as a place for studying alien remnant contamination. In four hours Mensah and Pin-Lee (Preservation was acting as an independent third-party arbiter) would be going to a meeting between the separatists and the University representatives from Holism to start working out the contract.