“Your second mom?” Kaede prompted.

“She’s the head of the— She was the head of the Preservation Alliance Council,” Amena explained. “Dr. Mensah. She was in the newsfeeds a lot in the CR—she was kidnapped by a corporate called GrayCris and rescued by a SecUnit on TranRollinHyfa, and there was a company armed ship that was attacked and another ship from a security corporate that got blown up.”

“Rescued by a…” Matteo trailed off and they all stared at me.

Which was not what I needed right now, cut off from the feed and ART’s cameras and my drones. I said, “ART, I thought you told them about me.”

ART said, I told them I had met a rogue SecUnit. I didn’t imply that you were every SecUnit ever mentioned in the newsfeeds.

I think I was every SecUnit mentioned in the newsfeeds during that time, but whatever. SecUnit 3 had stopped trying to pretend to be an appliance and was now watching in fascination.

“No, Peri didn’t…” Kaede exchanged a look with Iris again. “We heard a little about GrayCris going down but we weren’t really following the story…”

Matteo’s eyebrows tilted. “So the rumor that it was a rogue SecUnit on TranRollinHyfa—”

“Was true,” Ratthi finished. “I was one of the ‘unidentified conspirators’ who escaped and is to be held liable for ‘massive interference with commerce and property damage’ if I’m ever caught on that station again.” He shrugged. “So now we know things about each other.”

Iris thought it over, then lifted her hands. “Look, we can work all this out later. Can we agree for now that we’re all allies who keep each other’s confidences?”

“And we don’t like Barish-Estranza,” Matteo added.

“Agreed,” Arada said.

Thiago and Overse are here with the emergency medical kit. Great. I think I’m going to restart again.

I’m not going into detail because it was gross and involved a lot of leaking and removing projectiles and regenerating tissue the hard old-fashioned way with hand units and the emergency medical kit kept trying to spray everything with disinfectant.

At one point, Martyn, who was Seth’s marital partner and Iris’s second parent, got called in from Medical to consult. He was a bio expert, too, but was still in isolation getting decontaminated himself. “Hello,” he said, peering at us via a display surface ART had generated. “How many SecUnit friends does Peri have?”

Iris said, “No, Dad, this is the SecUnit Peri told us about, the one it was going to bomb the colony over.”

“Bomb the colony?” I said. We were still in the shuttle bay because they couldn’t move me, and I was lying face down, my head propped on my arms, while Thiago, Ratthi, and Kaede rebuilt the organic components in my back. It was a long process and humans kept wandering in and out to watch, but I had my pain sensors tuned down and ART had directly connected an isolation box to my interfaces so I could download my video and audio of TargetContact, and more importantly so ART could play Timestream Defenders Orion for me. ART had also told me that SecUnit 3 had finally figured out that it could walk around wherever it wanted now and was doing that. I thought Iris was confused about when the bombing the colony thing had happened. I said, “That was the distraction so it could retrieve you.”