As I whipped around the wall, Iris scrambled backward and almost fell out of cover. I stopped and said, “Don’t get into the line of fire, Iris.” (I know, I’m bad at this part. On a contract, I could say, Please don’t be alarmed, I’m your contracted SecUnit. You are in a dangerous situation. Please stop doing:insert stupid thing here: immediately.) Out in the drop box chamber, Targets shot blindly at each other, each side convinced the other had set off the poppers as the prelude to a rush attack. The rest of ART’s crew, still in the back of the lobby and working on the pod control, had reacted to the noise but hadn’t heard me enter the foyer. I added, “There’s only five of you here—where are the others?”

“Who are you?” Breathing hard, Iris pushed away from the wall but didn’t panic. I saw the change in her expression as she started to recognize the enviro suit I was wearing. (It went from righteously pissed off and terrified to confused.) “How did you get that suit?”

Overse and her drone raced through the upper corridors, headed back to the maintenance capsule to get it ready for our escape. Thiago waited in the corridor, one knee bouncing impatiently. I said, “I borrowed it from your transport. It sent me to retrieve you. Where are the other three?”

She frowned, uncertain and wary. “They didn’t make it off the corporate ship. A colonist helped us escape when they were transferring us to the space dock’s drop box. We couldn’t—” Her self-control was good but raw pain made her voice go thick. “She said it was too late for them. Then she was killed in the dock before I could find out what had happened—” She stopped, glaring. “If our transport sent you—from where? Where did you come from?”

A scan showed no anomalous power sources. I said, “They didn’t put an implant in you, did they? Show me the back of your neck.”

She was understandably pissed off. “I’m not going to turn around and show you my neck, strange person I just met on a hostile planet.”

Right, so, I could point out that I was the one with the weapons, but I didn’t want to make my first interaction with one of ART’s humans all about me threatening her when I had no intention of following through. It just seemed unproductive, basically. I said, “That’s what someone with an implant would say, strange person I just met on a hostile planet who I am trying to rescue.”

She was keeping her expression somewhere in the vicinity of angry tough, and doing a pretty good job of it, but I could see she knew it wasn’t an unreasonable request. “No, no implant. I know they did that to some of the explorer’s crew, but not to us.” She turned around, lifting her hair to show me.

“I’m going to touch your back briefly.” I stepped close enough to pull down the back of her T-shirt and make sure there was no wound. I stepped back. “Clear. Now in approximately five minutes I need you and the others to follow me out of here, turn to the left, and run down the first corridor. You’ll meet a human wearing one of Perihelion’s enviro suits. Follow him and do what he says.”