I had taken multiple shrapnel hits from the drones being shredded all around me. I had two hits from projectile weapons, one in my lower left side and one in my left shoulder. I was pretty certain I had been hit by stray shots meant for drones. If the bots had been able to target me, I would be in pieces. I tuned down my pain sensors and the impact sites faded from explosions down to embers. (I know that’s actually not a permanent solution and pretending bad things aren’t happening is not a great survival strategy in the long run, but there was nothing I could do about it now.) The arm where I was storing my memory clips was undamaged, which was a relief.

I started down the corridor toward the production pod foyer, where the others should be.

I tapped Miki’s feed for a report because neither it nor Abene were saying anything and I wasn’t sure what they had been able to see through my visual feed. At that point, Hirune’s gloved hand squeezed my shoulder.

Fortunately I remembered I was carrying a possibly living human and didn’t scream or drop her or anything. Her helmet with its comm mic had been ripped off, and her head rested on my shoulder. She slurred the words, “Who are you?”

I was distracted, and what came out of my buffer was the standard, “I’m your contracted SecUnit.” I was distracted because confused noise was coming from the connection with Miki and Abene. It wasn’t communication from a feed interface, it was audio; Miki was sending me open comm audio over the feed.

Her voice rough and deep with fury, Abene shouted, “Who sent you? GrayCris?”

On my shoulder, Hirune made a confused “huh?” sound.

The other comm audio I could hear was too faint even for me to tell what it was. I had to waste four seconds converting it to a spectrogram before I recognized it. It was two noises, the low pitch of Miki’s joints and the higher pitch of powered armor, bracing against each other.

Well, shit.

I do make mistakes (I keep a running tally in a special file) and it looked like I had made a big one. I had interpreted all of Wilken’s behavior as being about me, about the discomfort and paranoia associated with a SecUnit suddenly appearing out of nowhere, supposedly sent by another security consultant whose existence implied that the clients didn’t trust her and Gerth. (I know, the “it’s all about me” bit is usually a human thing.) But now it seemed she had been uneasy for a whole other reason.