What would have been helpful was an episode of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Or World Hoppers. Or anything. (Anything except MedCenter Argala.) But media would calm me down, and I wanted to stay angry.

I couldn’t sit here and wait, there had to be something else I could do. I stood up.

“Oh, you’re up.” Amena was sitting on the edge of the platform next to a half-conscious Eletra so she could hold her hand. She eyed me dubiously. “Already. I thought you were going to rest.”

“Do these make any sense to you?” I sent her the display images from ART’s bridge.

Amena blinked rapidly. “They’re navigation and power information, like from a pilot’s station.” She took in my expression and waved a hand in exasperation. “Well, if you knew that, why didn’t you say so?”

Fine, that one was on me. “They’re from my drone sealed in the control area. Do you know how to read them?”

Amena squinted at nothing again, but slowly shook her head and groaned under her breath. She glanced down at Eletra, who was unconscious again, and carefully untangled their hands. “From what she said, I doubt she was on the bridge crew.” Then she lifted her brows. “Do you know if there’s an aux station in engineering?”

I didn’t know that. “An aux station?”

“It’s like an extra monitoring station for the engineering crew. You can’t take control of the bridge unless the command pilot transfers the helm—at least you couldn’t in the ones I’ve seen—but you can get displays for the rest of the ship’s systems. We have them on some of our ships but I don’t know how common they are.” She admitted, “We might have them because our ships are an older design.”

It wasn’t the kind of thing that would be needed on a bot-piloted transport, but it couldn’t hurt to check.

My performance reliability had leveled out at 89 percent. Not great, but I could work with it. I still hadn’t identified the source of the drop. I’d taken multiple projectile hits without having that kind of steady drop. I took Ras’s energy weapon out of my jacket pocket and set it on the bench. “Keep this just in case. It’s not going to work on the targetDrones but it should work on the Targets.” I hate giving weapons to humans but I couldn’t leave her without something. “I’ll go to engineering.”

“Hold it, wait.” Amena hopped off the platform. “I want to go with you.”

I had a confusing series of reactions to this. Not in order: (1) Exasperation, at her, at myself. (2) Habitual suspicion. On my contracts for the company, the clingy clients were the ones most likely to (a) get me shot (b) advocate loudly for abandoning the damaged SecUnit because it would take too long to load me in the transport. (And humans wonder why I have trust issues.) (3) Overwhelming urge to kill anything that even thought about threatening her. “Someone has to stay here with the injured human.”