Unidentified One said, “You lie, it lies, everything’s lying. Don’t think we don’t know better.”

Tinged with desperation, Amena said, “I can’t do anything about that.”

The rest of my parts were checking in as functional and my performance reliability was climbing. The temporary shutdown had flushed a lot of stress toxins secreted by my organic parts and I actually felt better. Scan showed the fragments under my cheek were from components shielded by a case that read as stealth material. I’d been hit by a drone, maybe the same type I’d caught an image of in the facility before EVACing. It had hit me so hard it had knocked itself to pieces. None of ART’s drones—at least the ones it had let me see—had stealth construction. And maybe the forced restart had definitely done me some good because I was an idiot to not think of this before. If there were drones receiving orders, there had to be a feed active inside ART, just not on any of the standard channels. As my legs and feet came back online and I eased slowly upright, I tweaked my receivers to scan the whole range for activity.

My projectile weapon lay on the deck in pieces, like someone had used a tool to pound it apart. My saved schematic of ART’s interior layout came in handy as I mapped the direction of Amena’s voice. Down this curving corridor, to a cross corridor, to a crew lounge area. I didn’t make any noise.

By the time I got to the first curve in the corridor, I found their drone control feed. It was on an encrypted channel, like a military feed. Clever, except their encryption was practically ancient, in bot terms if not human. My last update of my ex-owner bond company’s proprietary key-breaker was 8700+ hours out of date, but it snapped their encryption like a twig.

Their feed was almost empty, no voices that I could detect, just drone commands. If their encryption was old, their drone codes might be, too. I pulled the oldest version of my drone key files and started cycling through them. My own drones were still in standby as I rebuilt my inputs and connections, but they were semi-useless at the moment, since the stealth material prevented them from scanning the hostile drones.

The doorway to the lounge where I’d detected Amena’s voice was open, brighter light falling into the half-lit corridor. I meant to wait until I was back up to at least 90 percent performance reliability but I heard Amena say, “There’s no weapon, you got the wrong ship.” The fear in her voice was more obvious and I was suddenly in the room.

(Impulse control; I should try to write a code patch for that.)

The compartment was large, with padded couches and seats built against the bulkheads, a few low tables that were designed to fold down into the deck, and various display surfaces, now inert, floating above them. Occupants included one client: Amena, backed up against the far wall, disheveled and wide-eyed but no apparent new damage. Two potential targets/possible casualties: both backed toward the far end of the compartment, past Amena. They had visible bruises and shocked/frightened expressions. Both casualties wore red and brown uniforms, disheveled and torn, with corporate logos. Another anomaly, since ART’s crew uniforms were dark blue.