Of course that just made it vulnerable.

I was also monitoring our outer perimeter and the scattered islands surrounding us, in case this was a distraction and there was a second boarding attempt planned. And of course I had a camera on the unfolding shitshow on the observation deck.

Thiago stood out there nearly four meters from the hatchway, not even wearing his protective gear, very much like a human who didn’t trust his SecUnit’s situation assessment. The apparent leader of the Potential Targets stood at the edge of the deck, barely three meters away, casually pointing a projectile weapon at Thiago. I was more worried about the six other Potential Targets scattered around on the stupid boat’s bow deck, and the nozzle of the weapon mounted above the bow deck currently trained on the upper level of our facility.

Some of the Potential Targets weren’t wearing helmets. There’s a thing you can do with these small intel drones (if your client orders you to, or if you don’t have a working governor module), when the hostiles are dumb enough to get aggressive without adequate body armor. You can accelerate a drone and send it straight at the hostile’s face. Even if you don’t hit an eye or ear and go straight through to the brain, you can make a crater in the skull. Doing this would solve the problem and get me back to new episodes of Lineages of the Sun much more quickly, but I knew Arada would make a sad face at me and Thiago would be pissed off. I would probably have to do it anyway. Unfortunately, Potential Target Leader was wearing a helmet.

(Thiago is a marital partner of Dr. Mensah’s brother, which is why I gave a crap about his opinion.)

Also, I had no intel yet on how many hostiles were inside the boat where the controls to the large weapon were. Prematurely eliminating the visible targets (excuse me, potential targets) on deck might just tip us out of incipient shitshow into full-on shitshow.

There was sort of a chance that Thiago might actually talk our way out of this. He was great at talking to other humans. But I had a drone waiting just inside the hatchway with Arada. (Overse would be upset if I let her marital partner get killed, and I liked Arada.)

Still managing to sound calm despite everything, Thiago said, “There’s no need for any of this. We’re researchers, we’re not doing anything to hurt anyone here.”

Potential Target Leader said something that our FacilitySystem translated through our feed as, “I showed you I’m serious. We’ll take what we want, then leave you in peace. Tell the others to come out.”

“We’ll give you supplies, but not people,” Thiago said.

“If you have nice supplies, I’ll leave the people.”

“You didn’t have to shoot anyone.” Heat crept into Thiago’s voice. “If you needed supplies, we would have given them to you.”

Don’t worry, the “anyone” who got shot was me.