That was a really good question.

My first thought was to try to destroy the alien remnant. Fortunately instead of doing that I went on to the next thought. (I don’t know anything about transport engines but I know you shouldn’t shoot at them, okay? They’re near the top of the long list of things it’s just obviously not a good idea to shoot at.) I needed more intel before I could do anything about this. I didn’t like the idea of saying “I don’t know” to Amena because humans panic and I almost don’t blame them because right now I feel like panicking and I was not in control of this situation and I could see at least ten instances now where I’d made wrong decisions and being in control of the situation was really important because otherwise it was in control of me and that felt like a short step to being back in the company’s control. And maybe I just had to trust Amena, who had tackled a much larger human because she had thought she needed to save me. I told her, I don’t know.

Amena sat up straight, biting her lip. Then she whispered to herself, “All right, all right. Let’s think.” On the feed, sounding much calmer than she looked, she said, Can you make that drone in the control area move around? If we can see a display that will tell us where we are, or if there’s a station or someplace we can try to send a distress signal …

That … wasn’t a bad idea. I exited the platform and went back up through the gravity well, telling Scout One to do a sweep of any active display surfaces. As its input filled with images, I pulled my archived video of its previous survey and ran a comparison. I was able to isolate five displays with significant changes. I enlarged them and set the images up in our feed so we could page through them. This one, Amena said immediately, this is local navigation. There’s info on the star … it doesn’t say if we’re close to the station … or if there’s a station at all …

I reached the monitoring area with its poor dead repair drone. I could see the display Amena was interpreting, but I’d found another diagram of ART on a new display. An indicator showed something attached to the outside of ART’s hull, on its lab module. Looking at the specifications … For fuck’s sake, it couldn’t be.

I’d shut off our comm because I didn’t want the Targets using it to track us, plus it wasn’t like anybody could contact us while we were in the wormhole. I reactivated it and checked the channel our survey had used. It was active.

Yeah, this was happening. I pinged the channel and got an immediate response, and transferred it to our feed relay. Amena clapped a hand to her head in shock. “What—”

A familiar voice said, SecUnit, Amena, can you hear me?