I stepped over to the emergency kit still sitting on the bench. It had some limited autonomous functions and had expanded and opened new compartments, responding to the humans’ distress. I took the small medical scanner it was trying to hand me and pointed it at Ras. It sent its report to my feed, with scan images of the inside of Ras’s body. A power source had jolted through the upper part of his chest, destroying the important parts there for pumping blood and breathing.

It looked, oddly, like what being punished by a governor module felt like—

Now there’s a thought.

I checked Scout Two in the control area foyer. The Targets had stopped listening at the sealed hatch and were gathered around Target Four, who now held a strange, bulky device. It was twelve centimeters across and a millimeter thick, with a flat old-fashioned solid-state screen. (I’d seen them on historical dramas.) All the Targets seemed excited about whatever it was showing them.

If it was something that made the Targets happy, it couldn’t be good.

My scan detected a tiny power source on both Eletra and Ras. It hadn’t been there earlier so something had activated it, most likely a signal from Target Four’s screen device. There was no time for finesse; I jammed the whole range.

Eletra slumped, limp and unconscious. If there’d been a last-ditch destroy-the-brain function, there was nothing I could do about it.

Scout Two now showed Target Four poking angrily at the screen as the others watched in obvious disappointment. Hah.

Amena, in the middle of yelling, “Will you stop just standing there and do something—” halted abruptly. The rest came out as a startled huff. She added, “Did you do that?”

“Yes.” I crouched down and lifted Eletra out of Amena’s lap. “This was caused by implants.”

I carried Eletra over to the nearest gurney and carefully set her down. Amena scrambled up and went to Ras. She reached for his arm and I said, “He’s dead.”

She jerked her hand back, then fumbled for the pulse in his neck. “What—How?”

I sent the medscanner’s images to her feed and she winced. “You said it was an implant? Is that like an augment?”

“No, it’s like an implant.” Augments were supposed to help humans do things they couldn’t otherwise do, like interface with the feed more completely or store memory archives. Augments that weren’t feed interfaces were meant to correct physical injuries or illnesses. Augments are helpful; implants are like governor modules.

I pointed the medscanner at Eletra. It found a raised temperature, increased heart rate, and increased respiration rate. I didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded bad. “When this happened, I had a drone view of the Targets in the central section using an unknown device.”

Amena pushed to her feet and stood beside Eletra’s gurney. She was accessing the medical scan data and her expression had that vague look that humans get when they’re reading in their feed. “That looks like an infection. Eletra said her back hurt.” Her face scrunching up with worry and fear, Amena carefully moved the dark hair away from Eletra’s neck, then half-turned her. She had to pull down the back of Eletra’s shirt to find it. Yeah, there was the implant.