Mensah nodded. “That’s my concern, especially if their survey package was missing potential hazard information the way ours is.”

Arada looked like it was just occurring to her that everybody over at DeltFall might be dead.

Ratthi said, “The thing that worries me is that their emergency beacon didn’t launch. If the habitat was breached, or if there was a medical emergency they couldn’t handle, their HubSystem should have triggered the beacon automatically.”

Each survey team has its own beacon, set up a safe distance from the habitat. It would launch into a low orbit and send a pulse toward the wormhole, which would get zapped or whatever happened in the wormhole and the company network would get it, and the pickup transport would be sent now instead of waiting until the end of project date. That was how it was supposed to work, anyway. Usually.

Mensah’s expression said she was worried. She looked at me. “What do you think?”

It took me two seconds to realize she was talking to me. Fortunately, since it seemed like we were really doing this, I had actually been paying attention and didn’t need to play the conversation back. I said, “They have three contracted SecUnits but if their habitat was hit by a hostile as big or bigger than Hostile One, their comm equipment could have been damaged.”

Pin-Lee was calling up specs for the beacons. “Aren’t the emergency beacons designed to trigger even if the rest of the comm equipment is destroyed?”

The other good thing about my hacked governor module is that I could ignore the governor’s instructions to defend the stupid company. “They’re supposed to be able to, but equipment failures aren’t unknown.”

There was a moment where they all thought about potential equipment failures in their habitat, maybe including the big hopper which they were about to fly out of range of the little hopper, so if something happened to it they were walking back. And swimming back, since that was an ocean-sized body of water between the two points on the map. Or drown; I guess they could just drown. If you were wondering why I was wincing earlier, this would be the reason.

The trip to the map’s black-out region had been a little out of our assessment parameters, but this was going to be an overnight trip, even if all they did was get there, see a bunch of dead people, turn around and go back.

Then Gurathin said, “What about your systems?”

I didn’t turn my helmet toward him because that can be intimidating and it’s especially important for me to resist that urge. “I carefully monitor my own systems.” What else did he think I was going to say? It didn’t matter; I’m not refundable.

Volescu cleared his throat. “So we should prepare for a rescue mission.” He looked okay, but MedSystem’s feed was still reporting some indicators of distress. Bharadwaj was stable but not allowed to get out of Medical yet. He continued, “I’ve pulled some instructions from the hopper’s info package.”