It sent me another set of audio clips and explained, They had difficulty installing an unidentified object to the explorer’s drive. The bot pilot was deleted and could not assist. Something disastrous happened and it has confused their plans. They needed a weapon to fight against future incursions to this system but the attempt to obtain one failed badly.

I played the clips to confirm the SecUnit’s conclusions, and checked the camera views of the ship’s drive just to make sure. Oh yeah, that looked bad. They had the same sort of alien remnant that had burned itself off ART’s drive and melted, only this one was hanging to the side and looked puffy. The engine casings were discolored on top and the monitoring stations threw a steady stream of error codes into the engineering feed.

So to summarize, the Targets had botched the install of their alien remnant drive onto the explorer’s engines, leaving the explorer no longer wormhole-capable. Also the group assigned to ART had lost control of it and now a giant armed transport was roaming the system implacably searching for vengeance.

The SecUnit continued, Note: Hostiles have fought among themselves while onboard, suggesting they are split into at least two factions, a situation that can be exploited in order to retrieve clients.

It fed me more info, mostly conversations picked up in corridors and the bridge via SecSystem’s cameras. I agreed with the analysis, it looked like there were different factions in the Targets’ leadership with different goals. One group didn’t know what to do, how to follow their plan, until they got ART back. Another group, possibly still on the surface, wanted to cut their losses and do something else. I said, They keep talking about spreading something to other humans? Are they referencing the alien remnant contamination?

The SecUnit said, I’m sorry, I don’t have that information.

Huh. We had always thought that somehow the implants, even though they seemed like boring old human tech, were connected to alien remnant contamination. This sure didn’t disprove that theory but I still needed more intel.

The SecUnit said, Query: do you have intel on SecUnit 2’s position/situation?

I had a bad feeling I knew the answer to that question. What was SecUnit 2’s last contact?

Last contact was on space dock with the client tactical squad. Contact was lost. SecUnit 1 was destroyed when the Hostiles breached the hatch. It hesitated 1.2 seconds and added, I am SecUnit 3.

I really wanted to lie. I’d seen that SecUnit in ART’s status update before I deployed. But I wanted it to trust me, so I had to tell it the truth. I said, The Targets left SecUnit 2 on the space dock after forcing one of your clients to order a stand down and freeze. It was killed by its governor module.

It didn’t respond. Then it said, Thank you for that information.

I had one of the mostly dead SecSystem’s inputs monitoring the bridge and had picked up a brief conversation. Running it through the translation module told me it was a discussion about how to make engine failure look convincing. The Targets couldn’t contact ART to tell it about the hostages, so they wanted ART to catch the explorer and dock with it. That way they could use its crew to force it to surrender.