Which didn’t mean the humans left me alone.

Ratthi came to my cabin. I didn’t have to let him in, so I did. (I know, I was still getting used to the idea of not minding the fact that a human wanted to talk to me.) He sat on the folding seat opposite my bunk and said, “Thiago will come around, you’ll see. He just doesn’t…”

Ratthi was reluctant to finish the sentence, so I did. “… trust me.”

Ratthi sighed. “It’s all the corporate propaganda about SecUnits being dangerous. He doesn’t know you. He doesn’t know what you’re really like.”

This would be annoying, if Ratthi didn’t genuinely believe it. He’s never seen me kill anyone close up and I’d like to keep it that way.

“And he didn’t know why it was so important that Mensah be protected on station.” He waved a hand at me though I hadn’t said anything. “I know, the more people who knew, the more chance of the newsfeeds finding out. And there was nothing else we could have done, really.”

After Ratthi left, Overse came. When I told the door to open, she just stuck her head in and said, “I don’t want to interrupt, I just wanted to thank you. This is Arada’s first time as a survey lead, and you’ve been really supportive and I know that’s made a difference, and helped her confidence.”

I had no idea how to react to that since I wasn’t sure what being supportive entailed. My job wasn’t to make the humans obey Arada, that wasn’t how Preservation worked. Besides, that hadn’t been a problem. The survey team was grumbly occasionally, but everybody had done their job to a reasonable level. The chance of a mutiny was so low it was registering as a negative number. I’m not sure the word “mutiny” could even apply to any situation that might occur with this survey team; most of them had to be begged to complete the required self-defense certification before we left. And this was what Preservation called an academic survey, where the data collected was going into a public database. (If the planet had been in the Corporation Rim, it would be open to exploitation, but out here nobody wanted it for anything.) I defaulted to, “Arada contracted with me.”

“Yes, and we both know that you’re very capable of making it clear when you think someone doesn’t know what they’re doing.” She smiled at the drone I was using to watch her. “That’s all.”

She left and I replayed the conversation a couple of times.

I trusted Arada’s judgment to a certain extent. She and Overse had always been firmly in the “least likely to abandon a SecUnit to a lonely horrible fate” category, which was always the category I was most interested in. They were my clients, that was all. Like Mensah, like Ratthi and Pin-Lee and Bharadwaj and Volescu (who had opted to retire from active survey work, which gave him the award for most sensible human) and yes, even Gurathin. Just clients. And if anyone or anything tried to hurt them, I would rip its intestines out.