After the team escapes the raiders, SecUnit notes that the survey is now ending early and deploys its drones around the mobile facility as it climbs toward orbit. Arada sends SecUnit to Medical, where Ratthi insists on decontamination and proper treatment for the gunshot wounds. While SecUnit is being checked, Arada anxiously asks whether shooting the raider leader had been necessary, and SecUnit tells Arada that waiting any longer would have forced SecUnit to try a riskier intervention and that the man may still survive if his own people treat him.

Once the MedSystem removes the bullets, Thiago confronts SecUnit in the corridor and asks whether SecUnit killed the attackers. SecUnit refuses to answer to Thiago and tells him to ask Arada instead. Thiago then apologizes for getting SecUnit shot but tries to excuse himself by claiming he had no reason to expect hostility; SecUnit, still angry that Thiago ignored established security protocol, gives him no reassurance and walks away.

An attached HelpMe.file excerpt then shifts to an earlier time on Preservation, when Mensah asked SecUnit to accompany her at a crowded planetary arts festival. During one party, Mensah abruptly called SecUnit to extract her from a tense conversation with Thiago and Farai, even though no obvious physical threat was present. SecUnit’s recollection shows that Mensah was already strained in ways her wider family did not understand, while SecUnit was quietly maintaining security because GrayCris had previously targeted her and because her family underestimated the danger.

The flashback also explains a separate source of conflict. SecUnit had identified an older man who was secretly pursuing Amena, lying about his age, isolating her, and trying to get her intoxicated. When the man lured Amena to a supposedly social meeting at his camp house, SecUnit appeared inside the house, scared him off, and then bluntly warned Amena that Mensah’s political prominence had changed the risks around the whole family. Mensah later told Amena that she had asked SecUnit to watch her, which made Amena resentful, while Thiago interpreted SecUnit’s role as proof that Mensah did not trust him to look after his niece.

Later that same night, Mensah and SecUnit sat outside the family camp house and finally discussed the real reason Mensah wanted SecUnit nearby. Mensah admitted that she had been having nightmares about her imprisonment under corporate authority and felt safer with SecUnit because SecUnit understood what had happened in a way most Preservation humans could not. SecUnit realized Mensah had not actually undergone the trauma treatment others assumed she had, told her she needed it, and heard Mensah insist that SecUnit should go on Arada’s survey both because the team needed protection and because Mensah needed to stop leaning on SecUnit so heavily. SecUnit says it then “sort of blackmailed” Mensah, and the excerpt closes by tying these unresolved emotional and family tensions directly to the dangerous mission now in progress.