ART said, I don’t know the answers to any of those questions.

Thiago looked down at Target Six. “There’s a possibility their appearance is the result of genetic or cosmetic manipulation. But…”

Ratthi finished, “But we have an alien remnant on the drive, that does suggest possible contamination…”

That’s why humans and augmented humans are so cautious around alien remnants that even corporations mostly try to be careful. Strange synthetics are usually harmless, emphasis on the “usually.” But organic elements can be really dangerous, where “really” means everyone dies horribly and nobody can ever go to the planet again.

Thiago’s mouth tightened. “If any of these people had been left alive, perhaps we could have asked them.”

I thought that was a shot at me, but ART apparently didn’t take it well. It said, If you’ll put that one on the medical platform, I can cut it open and see.

I was unimpressed, having heard ART’s “villain of a long-running mythic adventure serial” voice before, but all the humans got quiet. Amena shifted uncertainly and looked at me. Then Ratthi whispered, “Was that a subtle threat?”

I said, “No. It wasn’t subtle.”

Amena hugged herself, then said, “How did the gray people steal your crew?”

ART said, There was a catastrophic event when my crew and I first entered this system. My memory archive was disrupted and I’m still attempting to reconstruct it.

Oh, fantastic. I said, “Is your comm shut down?”

It was not an attack launched via the comm, because I’m not an idiot.

“And I’m not the one who got taken down by a viral malware attack, so maybe you are an idiot,” I said. Yeah, I was all over the place with that one.

ART said, It was not a viral malware attack, it was an unidentified event.

“That’s fucking reassuring.”

“Hey, hey!” Amena waved an arm, snapping her fingers. “Please don’t stop telling us what happened! So your crew were taken prisoner by these gray people, correct? And are the gray people from the lost colony that Eletra’s ship was looking for?”

Everybody turned to look at Eletra, who stared blearily back.

ART said, Those are logical assumptions, though I have no direct evidence to support them. I know that we arrived in this system in response to a distress call from a corporate reclamation expedition. At some point, I experienced a catastrophic system malfunction that caused me to reinitialize. After the reinitialization, I found the intruders aboard. They said they were holding my crew hostage, and demanded weapons. I offered a weapon.

Everybody looked at me again.

Arada did the lip-biting thing. “You brought them to SecUnit. Because you knew SecUnit would be able to handle the situation.”

I did.

“The attack on our baseship could have killed all of us,” Thiago said, some heat creeping into his voice.

No shit, Thiago, you think?

Ratthi hissed under his breath, but before he could tell Thiago to shut up, ART said, That was a chance I was willing to take.