I covered my face. “No.”

Right, so say, just theoretically, I was emotionally compromised. A recharge cycle which I actually didn’t need right now wasn’t going to help with that. So what would help with that?

Taking over targetControlSystem and hurting it very, very badly, that’s what would help with that.

My drone view showed Amena getting up and pacing slowly across the room, her shoulders drooping. Then on the platform, Eletra stirred and made bleary noises. Amena hurried over to her, saying, “Hey, it’s all right. You’re okay.”

Eletra blinked and peered up at her. She managed to say, “What happened? Is Ras all right?”

Amena leaned against the platform, and from the high angle she looked older, with lines on either side of her mouth. Keeping her voice low, she said, “I’m sorry, he died. You had these strange implants in your back, that were hurting you, and his killed him. We had to take yours out and it almost killed you. Did you know they were there?”

Eletra looked baffled. “What? No, that’s … I don’t understand…”

I checked my penetration testing, but there were no results. That was annoying. If a system won’t communicate with me, I can’t get inside it. And apparently targetControlSystem was operating as a single system. Stations and installations use multiple systems that work with each other as a safety feature. (Safety is relative.) I usually went in through a security system function and used it to get to all the others. (Technically, I am a security system, so it was easy to get other security systems to interact with me, or to confuse them into thinking I was already part of them.)

There are still ways to get into heavily shielded systems, or systems with unreadable code, or unfamiliar architecture. I didn’t have a lot of time, so I needed to use the most reliable method: get a dumb human user to access the system for me.

Ras’s implant had ceased functioning, probably having destroyed its own power source to kill him. Eletra’s implant was still in the emergency kit’s little container, where it thought anomalous things removed from humans needed to be stored. It was now covered with a sterile goo but was still capable of receiving. I dropped my jamming signal.

Via Scout Two in the control area foyer, Target Four had set the screen device aside on a bench. All the Targets were talking, ignoring the control area hatch. They looked agitated and angry. They might have figured out that we weren’t locked in the control area, finally. I was glad I hadn’t had the chance to kill all of them, since there was a possibility now that they might actually come in handy.

(I had no idea where the targetDrones were, but logic and threat assessment said they should be congregated up against the hatchways sealing off my safe zone. That was going to be a problem.)

I checked on Scout One’s progress, searching through the images of the floating display surfaces it had captured. Lots of shifting diagrams and numbers that might as well have been abstract art as far as I was concerned. These screens were meant to be interpreted through ART’s feed, and without it to explain and annotate the data, it was all a mess. Couldn’t anything be simple, just for once? I can fly low atmosphere craft but nobody ever thought it was remotely rational to give murderbots the modules on piloting transports. Wait, okay, there was a display with a schematic of ART’s hull, with a lot of moving wavy patterns around it that probably would make sense if I knew anything about what happens in wormholes. There was a time counter on it, but nothing indicated what it was timing. So, not helpful.