I said, “That provision is for humans.” It was worth a shot.

Ratthi corrected, “It says ‘all entities under contract,’” and sent me an excerpt of the relevant section from his feed storage.

Now I was speechless with being pissed off with Pin-Lee. She had negotiated the contract for me and deliberately put that in.

But Arada didn’t rub it in and nobody looked smug. Arada said firmly, “Thiago, SecUnit is in charge. You follow its orders immediately and without argument. If you can’t do that, I’ll go in your place.”

Thiago lifted his hands, palm out. “I will.”

I was desperate. I sent privately, ART, tell them I need to go alone. Back me up.

ART said aloud, I concur, it will be safer if SecUnit is accompanied by two certified survey specialists.

Why am I even surprised. I sent privately again, ART, you asshole.

ART replied, only to me, It is safer. I’ve lost my crew, I won’t lose you.

Amena said, not helpfully, “Your face just got really weird. Are you all right?”

No, it was confusing. I was confused.

13

My threat assessment was all over the place right now, but nobody thought ART should lock on to the dock. Instead it did some complicated maneuvers (the kind of thing I don’t know anything about and don’t have to know because ART does) to get close. Me and the two humans whose help I absolutely did not need took EVAC suits over to an airlock.

When we were near enough to see the pits and scarring on the dock’s hull, I picked up its feed. It was dormant but its SecSystem woke when I pinged and it asked for a Barish-Estranza entry code. The explorer must have had codes for the old Adamantine system, or had just released killware to take it down so they could upload their own. Whichever, this version of DockSecSystem was a recent upgrade, but something was wrong with its configuration and it had put itself in standby mode. I was a little nervous, despite the fact that my walls are excellent and targetControlSystem had made no attempt to take me over despite a lot of provocation, what with me trying to kill it and everything. But the fact that we still didn’t know why ART had experienced that first critical shutdown was still making me hyper-paranoid.

But at this point, the only thing I could do to find out if DockSecSystem was compromised was get in there and look. So I did.

The first thing I hit was a barrage of configuration errors. I couldn’t tell if the Barish-Estranza crew had failed the install or if something had tried to mess with it later. It made it a little harder to take control, not because it was trying to fight me but because nothing worked right. In fact, it seemed pathetically glad somebody who knew what they were doing was here. I got control of its entry functions before we reached the lock and told it to let us in.