My clients are the best clients.

Then hearing came online.

“I’ve had HubSystem immobilize it,” Gurathin said.

Huh. Well, that explained a lot. I still had control of SecSystem and I told it to freeze HubSystem’s access to its feed and implement my emergency routine. This was a function I’d built in that would substitute an hour or so of ambient habitat noise in place of the visual and audio recordings HubSystem made. To anyone listening to us through HubSystem, or trying to play back the recording, it would just sound like everybody had abruptly stopped talking.

What Gurathin had said had evidently been a surprise, because voices protested, Ratthi, Volescu, and Arada mostly. Pin-Lee was saying impatiently, “There’s no danger. When it shot itself, it froze the download. I was able to remove the few fragments of rogue code that had been copied over.”

Overse began, “Do you want to do your own diagnostic, because—”

I could hear them in the room and on the security feed, so I switched to just visual on the camera. Mensah had held up a hand for quiet. She said, “Gurathin, what’s wrong?”

Gurathin said, “With it offline, I was able to use HubSystem to get some access to its internal system and log. I wanted to explore some anomalies I’d noticed through the feed.” He gestured to me. “This unit was already a rogue. It has a hacked governor module.”

On the entertainment feed, this is what they call an “oh shit” moment.

Through the security cams, I watched them be confused, but not alarmed, not yet.

Pin-Lee, who had apparently just been digging around in my local system, folded her arms. Her expression was sharp and skeptical. “I find that difficult to believe.” She didn’t add “you asshole” but it was in her voice. She didn’t like anybody questioning her expertise.

“It doesn’t have to follow our commands; there is no control over its behavior,” Gurathin said, getting impatient. He didn’t like anybody questioning his expertise either, but he didn’t show it like Pin-Lee did. “I showed Volescu my evaluations and he agrees with me.”

I had a moment to feel betrayed, which was stupid. Volescu was my client, and I’d saved his life because that was my job, not because I liked him. But then Volescu said, “I don’t agree with you.”

“The governor module is working, then?” Mensah asked, frowning at all of them.

“No, it’s definitely hacked,” Volescu explained. When he wasn’t being attacked by giant fauna, he was a pretty calm guy. “The governor’s connection to the rest of the SecUnit’s system is partially severed. It can transmit commands, but can’t enforce them or control behavior or apply punishment. But I think the fact that the Unit has been acting to preserve our lives, to take care of us, while it was a free agent, gives us even more reason to trust it.”

Okay, so I did like him.

Gurathin insisted, “We’ve been sabotaged since we got here. The missing hazard report, the missing map sections. The SecUnit must be part of that. It’s acting for the company, they don’t want this planet surveyed for whatever reason. This is what must have happened to DeltFall.”