It meant it couldn’t see anything on the moon aiming at us. If that was the plan, it wouldn’t happen until we were underway. If somebody fired at the transit ring from the moon’s surface, I was pretty sure that would be a huge deal and there would be legal ramifications, if not immediate violent retaliation by ring security. I told ART, If they fire at us en route, it’s not like we can do anything about it.

ART didn’t answer, but I knew it well enough by now to know that meant something. I said, You don’t have a weapons system. There hadn’t been one on the schematics. At least the schematics that ART made available in its unsecured feed. Do you?

ART admitted, I have a debris deflection system.

There’s only one way to deflect debris. I had never been on an armed ship but I knew they were subject to a whole different level of licensing and bond agreements. (If one of them accidentally shoots something it’s not supposed to, somebody has to pay for the damage.) I said, You have a weapons system.

ART repeated, For debris deflection.

I was starting to wonder just what kind of university owned ART.

Rami was watching me worriedly. “Is everything okay?”

I nodded and tried to look neutral.

Tapan leaned past ter to ask, “Are you in the feed? I can’t find you.”

I told her, “I’m on a private channel with a friend in the ring who’s monitoring the shuttle’s departure. Just making sure everything’s okay.”

They nodded and sat back.

The shudder went through the deck that meant the shuttle had uncoupled from the ring and started to move. I cozied up to the bot pilot. It was a limited function model, not nearly as complex as even a standard transport driver bot. I had the ShuttleSecSys tell it I was authorized by ring security, and it pinged me cheerfully. The crew member was sitting in the cockpit with it, using her feed to catch up on admin tasks and read her social feed download, but there was no human pilot aboard.

I leaned back in my seat and relaxed a little. Media was tempting, and from the echoes I could pick up in the feed, that’s what most of the humans were doing. But I wanted to keep monitoring the bot pilot. This may seem overcautious, but that’s how I was built.

Then twenty-four minutes forty-seven seconds into the flight, as we were on approach, the bot pilot screamed and died as killware flooded its system. It was gone before ShuttleSecSys or I could react; I flung up a wall around us both and the killware bounced off. I saw it register task complete and then destroy itself.