Mercenaries, huh? It's starting to sound an awful lot like a survival of the fittest kind of deal, and Rachel's okay with that. She knows how to survive. The mercenaries make her curious, and she's filing that away to ask about later, too, but she has a question that's far more pressing.

She honestly hesitates on asking, because she's afraid that if this is somehow some Controller operation, as unlikely as it seems, she'll be outing herself. But...this guy seems all right, and Rachel has to know.

"There are a lot of aliens here, right?" She glances around again, this time just a little nervously. "Can I ask you something? Have you ever met or heard of any Andalites here? Or Hork-Bajir? Or -- Yeerks?"