Thiago agreed. “Whatever happened later, someone at Adamantine seems to have gone into this intending to see it through to a successful developed world.”

Maybe. The plans indicated not just a lot of expensive surveying work onplanet, but a lot of offsite development, too. Maybe they had spent too much and that was why they had gone bankrupt.

I don’t know what was worse, getting a bunch of “volunteer” contract labor colonists killed as part of an investment scheme, or getting a bunch of actual volunteer colonists killed because of mistakes and mismanagement that ended up exposing the controlling corporation to a hostile takeover.

Overse walked farther up the wall. “And most of these control stations are just unused templates. They were leaving a lot of room for expansion, as if this dock was going to be part of a much larger network.”

On the comm, Amena said, “Then why did they try to keep the corporation who was taking over from knowing where the colony was? Did it not need supplies anymore?”

“That’s a good question.” Overse stepped over to another console. “Maybe it was already self-sufficient.”

Thiago told Overse, “Let’s look for the drop box station. If there’s a log file, we may be able to tell if the colonists were actually allowed to use this dock.”

From our comm, Ratthi said, “But they wouldn’t have had a ship, so why come up here?”

“We don’t know that they didn’t have a ship,” I said, before ART could. It was a good line of inquiry; if there was another ship running around this system, even if it was a short-range type without wormhole capability, it would be important intel. Seeing the inside of the dock had caused some recalculations in my assessments. Who the fuck knew; Adamantine, planning optimistically for a future none of them were going to see, might have left the colonists a small fleet.

Thiago and Overse split up, moving up the walls, checking the stations. Some had marker captions, which provided brief descriptions of what they were for, except they were in a language I didn’t recognize. With no systems on the feed but the new Security load, there was no translation.

Frustrated, Overse said, “Thiago, do you have this language loaded on your interface?”

Thiago answered, “Yes, this is Variance063926. Perihelion, if I tag the right module, can you—” ART was already pulling the module from Thiago’s feed storage and creating a working vocabulary to send back to me and Overse. Thiago finished, “Thank you, Perihelion.”

Overse stopped at a station. “This is it.” She leaned over, using the manual interface to try to get the station to boot. Thiago jogged across the wall to join her.

I was finally able to access DockSecSystem’s video archive and started downloading. I kept hitting corrupted spots and having to work around them. I was still worried about encountering killware or malware or targetControlSystem, but realistically, this situation was the same as the B-E shuttle in ART’s dock: setting a trap here on the off chance that a SecUnit might directly access DockSecSystem seemed like a stretch. It still didn’t make me any less paranoid. (Let’s face it, nothing would.)