If you were sentenced to death, wouldn't you jump at a chance for life? Even if that reprieve meant leaving Earth to live on a spaceship full of freaks, the hideous survivors of a DNA altering plague?
Arlen Rowell took that chance and found the freaks were a finer stock of folks than the ones who shunned them from their home planet.
On the ship Benevolence, Arlen found integrity, courage, danger, and...love. Then he found a way to contact the other nine Freak Ships with the idea that 50,000 freaks could seek a planet to call home.