This was one of the corridors I had walked up and down, working on my pretending-to-be-a-human code, where ART had critiqued my performance. Maybe that made me less cautious. That and the fact that my drones had just passed through here seconds ago. As I stepped into the corridor, something moved in my peripheral vision.

This is why we have drones. Unfortunately, whatever this was, my guard drone hadn’t registered its presence. I didn’t see it until it moved, and that was too late.

I took the hit right in the side of my head and got body-slammed against the bulkhead.

Performance reliability catastrophic drop.

Shutdown.

Restart.

I was lying in a heap on the deck, a broken fragment of something grinding into my cheek. I knew I’d had an emergency shutdown. (I miss my armor all the time, but particularly at times like this.)

I need the organic parts inside my head, but they have much better shock absorption in there than inside a human skull. You can hit a SecUnit hard enough to make our performance reliability drop so fast and so low it triggers a temporary shutdown. (Operative word: temporary.) But it’s really not a good idea. Not if you want to keep your internal organs inside your body and not smeared on the bulkheads of your stolen transport.

Oh, it’s on now.

My drones had gone dormant and my systems weren’t online to access them yet. My audio kicked back in and I picked up sound coming from down the corridor. A voice, Amena’s voice, too low for me to make out the words. I tapped the input for my drone relay feed; it was a passive connection and still transmitting.

Amena’s voice was hard with what was clearly false bravado: “You’ve made a big mistake. There are armed ships minutes away. They’ll be here—”

“Oh, little child, we’re in the bridge-transit. No one will ever find you again.” The voice (Unidentified: One) was light, arch, with an echo caused by an out-of-date pre-feed translator system. “Now tell us about the weapon.”

Amena’s bravado was turning into real anger. “Our survey facility wasn’t armed. If it was, you’d be blown to pieces.” (Note to humans and augmented humans: no one likes being patronized.)

Unidentified One sounded even more amused. “You had better have the weapon we were told of, or I’ll take your ribs out one by one and break them in front of your little face.”

I saved that for future reference. Unidentified One seemed to have gone to some trouble with the wording of that threat, it would be a shame if they never experienced it firsthand.

Another voice (Unidentified: Two) said, “I hate lying, all these things lie.” It sounded almost identical to Unidentified One, except it was slightly deeper in tone.

Amena said, “I’m not lying, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A little of her fear leaked through. I think she was beginning to realize she wasn’t talking to an intelligence that was open to rational argument.