System Unit Acknowledge: Identify?

I could lie, say I was from Barish-Estranza. (Face it, considering how often I accuse ART of lying, I lie a lot. I mean, a lot.) But I didn’t want to lie right now. I said, I’m a rogue SecUnit, working with the armed transport who is pursuing this ship with the intention of retrieving endangered clients. I am currently present as killware inside the explorer’s SecSystem.

It didn’t reply. I can tell you as a SecUnit that under these circumstances this is just about the last thing you expect to hear. Also, SecUnits normally aren’t allowed to communicate with each other so it would be reluctant to drop protocol. I said, There’s no protocol for any of this. Just talk to me.

There was another three second pause. I don’t know what to say.

That was encouraging. (I’m actually not being sarcastic here—the last time I’d tried to talk a SecUnit into helping me, it had just gotten more determined to kill me. But it had been a CombatUnit and they’re assholes.)

I said, Three of my clients are inside the compartment nearest you. Have you seen these others? I showed it images of the unaccounted-for members of ART’s crew.

It said, At this time SecSystem is nonfunctional but I have video in my archive. It was way more comfortable giving information than figuring out what to say to a rogue SecUnit killware. It sent me two clips, and then summarized them for me because it was used to reporting to humans who never understood what they were looking at. Eight unidentified humans were forcibly brought aboard by the Hostiles but five disembarked at approximately 2260 ship’s time when we reconnected to the space dock.

In the first clip I watched ART’s crew, all eight of them, being dragged aboard through the airlock, most semi-conscious. The second clip was of a group of five being prodded off the ship into an airlock and yeah I had a bad moment there but the ship’s status in the metadata showed the SecUnit was right, the ship was connected to the dock at that point. Also, four Targets followed them. I asked, Do you know where they were taken?

This time it had an audio clip of two Targets talking as they walked down the corridor past it. They were using that mix of Pre–Corporation Rim languages that Thiago had identified, but a translation had been loaded to HubSystem and the SecUnit had pulled it into its own archives. It summarized, The Hostiles implant humans with devices similar to our governor modules. They ran out of unused devices and returned to the space dock to send all humans without implants to the surface.

I guess running out of implants made sense, if you were a Target/idiot and hadn’t been expecting to encounter ART or its crew. I said, So all the humans in that cabin have implants, which are holding them immobile.

Correct.

That was not great news, but it was helpful to know. What other intel do you have about the Hostiles?