Scars

John Redgrave likes being with the Alphas. They're just like him.

They say it takes a certain type of crazy to be an Alpha pilot. Actually, scratch that, people say it takes a certain type of crazy to leave Earth at all. The galaxy's a big empty disc of nothing (well, there's planets, stars, and whatnot, but it's still mostly nothing), and it's a silent one at that. In contrast, Earth is a paradise. A utopia. It's like leaving Eden without the serpent screwing things up.

Then again, leaving Earth is quite an easy choice for John Redgrave. When your body is scarred from a teleportation accident, when those scars can't be healed, you tend to be an outsider on a world where death and disease are unheard of and not discussed respectively. No. Leaving Earth sounds perfectly sound.

So he's with the Alphas. On the surface, people like him. People who have left Earth for one reason or another. People willing to do the dirty work in a galaxy that needs little of that work done admittedly, but the work exists nonetheless. But it's not that that he appreciates. It's what lies beneath their exteriors. Of what they've seen. What they've done. How out here, in the dark of space, dark deeds must be carried out so that the light of civilization can continue to shine.

Like him, they're also scarred.