Leonide stopped and waited, and Arada traded her a little more information. “Your techs, Eletra and Ras, had been implanted with these small devices.” On our private feed channel, Arada asked me, Now?

Yeah, now was good. I stepped forward, causing a chorus of nervous twitches from Leonide’s escort, and set a small sterile container with Eletra’s implant next to Arada’s hand on the couch. As I stepped back, she picked it up and passed it over to Leonide. We’d kept Ras’s implant and the Targets’ implants, though Overse hadn’t had any luck yet getting information from them. We’d figured since they were the more murdery implants, they might tell us more.

Leonide frowned, but thoughtfully, and consulted with an engineering supervisor in her feed. A tech came in to collect the container and carry it away.

Leonide said, “That might explain how they were controlling our contact group. As far as we can tell, when the group returned to the explorer via the space dock, they were somehow forced to take the rest of the crew prisoner. Our security system received a truncated warning of a viral threat, so we were able to cut off feed access before our systems were contaminated. It gave us some moments to prepare, before the explorer fired on us.”

According to SecSystem, the warning had come from one of the SecUnits. It had sent a code burst that had told the supply transport’s SecSystem to cut comm and feed and order the bot pilot into a defensive stance, just in time not to get blown up. The supply transport had then fled, as the explorer uncoupled from the dock. The explorer had fired again at the supply transport, damaged its engines and other systems, then headed away.

It was disturbing data. Raiders would have been intending to lure the supply transport in and take it, too. This looked an awful lot like the whole goal of the Targets was to get off the planet. Once they had secured an armed ship, they hadn’t bothered with the unarmed supply transport, even though it was, you know, full of supplies.

If they had control of the explorer’s crew and bot pilot, they would have been aware that they had just damaged the supply transport’s wormhole capability, ART said.

I don’t know how long ART had been riding my feed, probably the whole time. The SecSystem tried to block ART and I quickly put up a wall and deleted its memory of the contact. (ART really did not care to be challenged by other resident systems and I didn’t want the friendly SecSystem deleted.) I said, You were supposed to keep out of this in case this ship was compromised.

ART ignored that. Possibly the explorer attacked me because the Targets wanted a second wormhole-capable ship. Or a better armed one.

Maybe, though that wasn’t a conclusion that told us much of anything. It was like saying that they had wanted ART because it was pretty.