That was ART’s designation and registry. Okay, so. Good news: I’m not having some kind of memory or system crash, this was really ART. Bad news: what the fuck?

I sent another ping.

Amena turned back to me. “This must be a stolen survey ship.” Her voice was firmer, less breathy with incipient panic. “I guess the raiders armed it.”

“It was already armed.” I thought, It’s my friend. It helped me because it wanted to, because it could. I couldn’t say any of that. I hadn’t told anyone about ART. “It’s a deep space research and teaching vessel with a full crew and passenger complement. Between missions it travels as a bot-piloted cargo vessel, but Preservation isn’t on its route.”

“Research and teaching vessel,” Amena repeated. “If the raiders had a ship this big, with weapons, why bother with us? Maybe they thought we had something valuable on board? Or they just go around attacking research ships? They hate research?”

She was being sarcastic but I knew of raiders who had done things like this for reasons almost as stupid. But this wasn’t a memory ghost/hallucination, which meant it was still a statistically unlikely coincidence, and that was … statistically unlikely.

“Wait, you know this ship.” Her voice turned suspicious. The statistically unlikely part must have occurred to her, too. “Did you do something to them? Are they here after you?”

“Of course not.” That was a total lie, because ART had to have come here after me, though knowing that didn’t make this any less baffling. It wasn’t like ART’s crew came here for revenge because the murderous rogue SecUnit— Hold it, could they be here for revenge? I hadn’t hurt ART or anything onboard, unless you counted some power and resource usage that ART had expunged from its logs.

That seemed a weird thing to shoot up an unarmed survey ship over. I mean, they could have just sent Dr. Mensah an invoice.

Unless somebody had managed to get aboard after I left and do something to ART, and blamed me for it.

One big problem with that scenario, no wait, two: 1) getting aboard without ART’s cooperation and 2) doing something to ART without getting violently murdered. (I knew of forty-seven ways that ART could kill a human, augmented human, or bot intruder, and the only reason I didn’t know more is because I got bored and stopped counting.)

And where the hell was ART? Where was its feed, its drones, its comm, its humans? Why wouldn’t it answer my pings?

I didn’t forget that I had one of ART’s comms tucked into the pocket under my ribs. (Okay, I did forget until three minutes and forty-seven seconds ago, but it wasn’t like I’d needed to access the information until now.) The comm had been deactivated and inert since I left ART on RaviHyral’s transit ring. If ART wanted to call me, it could have used it as soon as we were in range. But that was assuming that ART was still in control of itself. Was something else—bot or human or augmented human—controlling ART’s ship-body?