I didn’t look at him though I knew through the feed that he was looking at me. I hadn’t closed my helmet; I didn’t feel like hiding from him. After a moment I realized he was waiting for my permission. That was weirdly new. It was tempting to ignore him, but I was wondering what the test would be this time. Something he didn’t want the others to hear? I said, “Go ahead.”

He said, “Did they punish you, for the deaths of the mining team?”

It wasn’t completely a surprise. I think they all wanted to ask about it, but maybe he was the only one abrasive enough. Or brave enough. It’s one thing to poke a murderbot with a governor module; poking a rogue murderbot is a whole different proposition.

I said, “No, not like you’re thinking. Not the way a human would be punished. They shut me down for a while, and then brought me back online at intervals.”

He hesitated. “You weren’t aware of it?”

Yeah, that would be the easy way out, wouldn’t it? “The organic parts mostly sleep, but not always. You know something’s happening. They were trying to purge my memory. We’re too expensive to destroy.”

He looked out the port again. We were flying low over trees, and I had a lot of my attention on the terrain sensors. I felt the brush of Mensah’s awareness in the feed. She must have woken when Gurathin spoke. He finally said, “You don’t blame humans for what you were forced to do? For what happened to you?”

This is why I’m glad I’m not human. They come up with stuff like this. I said, “No. That’s a human thing to do. Constructs aren’t that stupid.”

What was I supposed to do, kill all humans because the ones in charge of constructs in the company were callous? Granted, I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones, but you can’t have one without the other.

The others started to stir, waking and sitting up, and he didn’t ask me anything else.

* * *

By the time we got within range, it was a cloudless night with the ring glowing in the sky like a ribbon. I had already dropped speed, and we were moving slowly over the sparse trees decorating the hills at the edge of the habitat’s plain. I had been waiting for the drones to ping me, which they would if this had worked and EvilSurvey hadn’t found them.

When I felt that first cautious touch on my feed, I stopped the hopper and dropped it down below the tree line. I landed on a hillside, the hopper’s pads extending to compensate. The humans were waiting, nervy and impatient, but no one spoke. You couldn’t see anything from here except the next hill and a lot of tree trunks.

All three drones were still active. I answered the pings, trying to keep my transmission as quick as possible. After a tense moment, the downloads started. I could tell from the timestamps that, with nobody there to instruct them not to, the drones had recorded everything from the moment I’d deployed them to now. Even though the part we were most interested in would be near the beginning, that was a lot of data. I didn’t want to stay here long enough to parse it myself, so I pushed half of it into the feed for Gurathin. Again, he didn’t say anything, just turned in his chair to lie back, close his eyes, and start reviewing it.