This could blow up in my face in that all the drones might decide to slam through here at once to get me, but I didn’t think that would happen. The bots hadn’t sent them after us yet because they didn’t want us to know they had them, probably because that’s how they intended to attack the shuttle. I was hoping the drones were set to protect the perimeter and a sentry would come to investigate.

I came to a spot where a connector in the tube had empty slots where equipment was supposed to be fitted. It formed shadowy cubbies and I stepped into one. My scan stretched as far as it would go, still sending my tempting intermittent signal. And I got a response. A staticky burst, like a comm trying to reply to me and being drowned out by interference.

A normal SecUnit (you know, one that still had its governor module, less anxious than me but probably more depressed) could do this part, but would be restricted to the canned responses available in the combat stealth module. A drone might be able to recognize those responses as coming from another combat unit and not a human. I didn’t have the combat stealth module anyway (I had never been upgraded with it, probably due to RaviHyral and the whole “killing all the clients” thing, go figure), so I used snippets of dialog from my media storage, extracted and processed to eliminate background noise and music and to remove any identifying code underlying the audio. I sent my prerecorded “Are you—can’t find—where—ship—” artistically obscured with static.

The drone sent another artistic burst of static in response. From its signal strength it was getting closer. I stayed where I was, waiting.

On the feed, Miki said, We’re worried about what you’re doing, SecUnit.

Nothing on scan yet, so I had time to chat. Why are you worried, Miki?

Because we don’t know what you’re doing. Wilken is telling Dr. Abene on her feed that you aren’t doing anything—

The drone had just come into my scan range, moving slowly so as not to alert the human it thought was here. Standing in the dark cubby, I had stopped breathing, stopped any activity it might pick up. I teased it with a little more comm audio. The schematic showed these slots as part of an atmospheric gas sampling station, so the drone had no idea there was room for something human-sized to hide. Confused at the apparently empty passage, it tried to trace the signal. And I pinged it with a compressed list of drone control keys.