Wait, what? I ran back my recording and listened to Brais say, “We can use the shuttle to knock the zipper off course. Our shielding will protect our hull—”

Squinting at the display, Ejiro said, “But wouldn’t the zipper be able to return and try again?”

Brais shook her head, still watching the flight projection. “I’ve pulled the specs on that model of zipper. It’s meant for facility maintenance and needs a feed connection to the engineering pod to operate. We can push it out of range and it’ll lose navigation control.”

Oh, great. How long was that going to take?

By the time I caught up to realtime, they had already decided to do it, they were just arguing about specifics.

I stood there watching the glowing shapes on the display as Kader took the shuttle closer to the zipper. I admit, I did watch a little more of the episode I had paused while this was going on. (It was only six minutes, but it was a boring six minutes, okay? Also, Miki had walked over to stand sadly next to Abene and stare at me, and I was ignoring it. Abene thought Miki was sad about the missing hand, and kept patting it and telling it they would get it fixed as soon as they got back to the station.)

(It’s a good thing I don’t have a stomach and can’t vomit.)

Finally the shuttle bumped the zipper off its course, dramatically saving the tractor array and GoodNightLander Independent’s investment with forty-five seconds to spare, yay. The humans congratulated each other, and Abene and Brais helped Hirune stand so they could take her to the medical unit. There was still one combat bot left on the facility, but that sounded like somebody else’s problem. The shuttle had altered course to head back to the station and we were close enough already for me to ping Ship through the feed. It pinged back, still waiting for me. That was a relief.

And I heard a clank from the hatch.

I’m not an expert on space, but I was pretty sure stuff wasn’t supposed to knock on the hatch. It might have been debris from the zipper, but I knew. I just knew it wasn’t. I checked the hatch camera, and got a wide-angle view of combat bot face.

The next connection overrode the station feed, temporarily blotting out all my channels: [Objective: kill intruders.]

Oh, shit.