She said, “Thank you,” and I followed her up into the hopper.

The others were stowing the equipment and supplies that had gotten tossed in right before takeoff. “—If they restore the satellite function,” Ratthi was saying.

“They won’t chance that until—unless they get us,” Arada said.

Over the comm, Pin-Lee sighed, angry and frustrated. “If only we knew who these assholes were.”

“We need to talk about our next move.” Mensah cut through all the chatter and took a seat in the back where she could see the whole compartment. The others sat down to face her, Ratthi turning one of the mobile seats around. I sat down on the bench against the starboard wall. The feed gave us a view of the little hopper’s compartment, with the rest of the team sitting there, checking in to show they were listening. Mensah continued, “There’s another question I’d like the answer to.”

Gurathin looked at me expectantly. She isn’t talking about me, idiot.

Ratthi nodded glumly. “Why? Why are these people doing this? What is worth this to them?”

“It has to have something to do with those blanked-out sections on the map,” Overse said. She was calling up the stored images on her feed. “There’s obviously something there they want, that they didn’t want us or DeltFall to find.”

Mensah got up to pace. “Did you turn up anything in the analysis?”

In the feed, Arada did a quick consult with Bharadwaj and Volescu. “Not yet, but we hadn’t finished running all the tests. We hadn’t turned up anything interesting so far.”

“Do they really expect to get away with this?” Ratthi turned to me, like he was expecting an answer. “Obviously, they can hack the company systems and the satellite, and they intend to put the blame on the SecUnits, but . . . The investigation will surely be thorough. They must know this.”

There were too many factors in play, and too many things we didn’t know, but I’m supposed to answer direct questions and even without the governor module, old habits die hard. “They may believe the company and whoever your beneficiaries are won’t look any further than the rogue SecUnits. But they can’t make two whole survey teams disappear unless their corporate or political entity doesn’t care about them. Does DeltFall’s care? Does yours?”

That made them all stare at me, for some reason. I had to turn and look out the port. I wanted to seal my helmet so badly my organic parts started to sweat, but I replayed the conversation with Mensah and managed not to.

Volescu said, “You don’t know who we are? They didn’t tell you?”

“There was an info packet in my initial download.” I was still staring out at the heavy green tangle just past the rocks. I really didn’t want to get into how little I paid attention to my job. “I didn’t read it.”

Arada said, gently, “Why not?”

With all of them staring at me, I couldn’t come up with a good lie. “I didn’t care.”