Amena followed me to the shuttle, dragging her feet. (She really needed to sleep. I hadn’t heard anything from Arada about it so I put Humans need to take rest periods on the general action list. Up in the central corridor, Ratthi saw it and muttered, “Please, yes, soon.”)

I did a brief visual check on both of ART’s shuttles, just to verify that they were empty and hadn’t been tampered with. The Barish-Estranza shuttle was parked inside the same docking module, attached to a module lock, which had an extendable tube to enclose the hatch. ART had said there was no one inside the shuttle, and no active bot pilot, but I made Amena hang back down the corridor with her assigned drones while I approached. The hatch was sealed, but not code-locked, which made sense when we thought Eletra and Ras were telling the truth about being captured trying to escape from their doomed transport. (Now that we were certain it hadn’t happened that way, who the hell knew?)

ART had cut the shuttle off from the feed. I touched the lock cautiously. (Considering the inactive state of its onboard systems, I wasn’t expecting alien killware or a sentient virus or something else unspecified to leap across and infect me, but the fact remained that something had happened to ART despite all its protections, and alien killware was still a possibility.) I still couldn’t pick up any feed activity, so I pushed up one sleeve and adjusted my energy weapon to deliver a pulse that caused the seal to disengage. The hatch slid open, releasing a puff of slightly stale air. It didn’t have the algae/growth medium smell associated with the Targets; in fact, it had traces of the dirty sock smell associated with humans. But then an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Or past absence. Whatever, you know what I mean.

I used my own scan, making sure there was no movement or active weapons inside, and stepped in.

The shuttle wasn’t a model I had been in before, but the configuration was similar to a standard transport shuttle. It was small, sized for ten humans at most, no cabins, a toilet facility that folded out from the bulkhead (ugh). The individual seats were in a spiral in the main compartment, so they would have to be cycled around to release each passenger for disembarking. It was obviously meant for short trips between ships or from ship-to-station. The cockpit had a seat for a human pilot next to the currently absent bot pilot’s interface console. The upholstery showed signs of ordinary wear and tear. The single passenger compartment was generally clean but there were scuff marks on the panels and padding. There was only a .01 percent chance it had been constructed as a trap by an alien intelligence. (It was a theory, okay.)

On our private feed connection, Amena said, Is it empty? Is there anything strange in it? Can I come closer?