The Servitor blinked both “eyes” and found her, standing to its imposing height before nodding its head once. “Power levels at six percent and climbing.” His larger orb eye had already scanned and identified her. “Greetings, Merchantia Junior Salvager Devar. Welcome aboard the Brigantine, a Class A—”

“No time for that, friend, sorry,” she interjected, holding up a gloved hand. “JAX, access the Brigantine’s itinerary, try a month out from failure.”

Walters had begun breathing heavily on the other end again. Hopefully he would keep the nervous flirtations to himself.

JAX’s crisp, automated voice filled the galley, echoing slightly. “Mission day sixty, refueling contact with unidentified civilian craft. Mission day sixty-three, scheduled resupply stop with MSC vessel 809-T, freighter class; mission day seventy, scheduled stop with moon base Terralon, Proxima Centauri system; mission day seventy-five, unscheduled contact, Coeur d’Alene Station, Proxima Centauri system. Unavailable, unavailable . . .”

“Unavailable?” Rosalyn sat back on the stool, crossing her arms and studying the Servitor with a puzzled frown. There was more than one red flag waving wildly in front of her face. Civilian contact. Unscheduled stops. Maybe Girdy’s instincts were right. Something strange was going on.

“Define ‘unavailable’ for me, JAX. That’s a new one.”

“You’ve never gotten that from a Servitor before?” Walters asked. He sounded winded. Spooked.

“It’s probably just an error, like the life-forms reading. He’s a second-run model, practically a relic now. No offense, JAX.”

The Servitor tilted its head to the side. She imagined it grinning wryly at her. “None taken, Junior Salvager.”

“Define, please,” she prompted it.

“Unavailable: designated classified or otherwise corrupted.”

“Fantastic,” she muttered. What a headache. She was going to get herself and Walters fired over a faulty robot. Sighing, she pulled a cable out of her bag and ran it from one of many small data link ports in the Servitor’s chassis to the lifeless monitor near the door covered with flowering blue growth. “All right, JAX, access the ship’s data directly. Search for anything relevant in itinerary, manifest and navigation. I want to know about these ‘unavailable’ stops, specifically the unscheduled and civilian contact.”

“Might I remind you that our job is to just clean this shit up and leave? Let the lawyers deal with this Sherlock shit.”

“There’s unidentifiable blue matter all over the walls, and something is suspicious with both the life-reading scanner and now their Servitor. I’m not going another step farther inside this wreck without knowing what I’m getting myself into.”

Walters swore incoherently on the other end.

“Unavailable.”

“What?” She turned back to the Servitor, which appeared to be staring somewhere over her shoulder. “Say again.”

“The data you requested is unavailable, Junior Salvager, my apologies.”

Her helmet was going to fog from so much sighing and mumbling. “JAX, run a self-diagnostic. Has anyone tampered with you recently?”