Ratthi and Amena visit SecUnit, who has shut itself in a restroom and is refusing ART’s attempts to contact it. Ratthi tries to name the bond between SecUnit and ART, but SecUnit angrily rejects words like friendship and insists ART is manipulative and dishonest. Ratthi also explains that Arada and Thiago have reached a practical agreement with ART: they will help search for ART’s missing crew, and ART will help them return toward Preservation space. When SecUnit explains how rescue works in Corporation Rim territory, the humans realize that sending a distress call would likely lead to corporate entanglement, expense, and danger; Amena also learns she may need to assert legal ownership of SecUnit if corporates appear.

SecUnit leaves the restroom because it believes ART has lied about why it came to this system. In Medical, SecUnit publicly challenges ART’s claim that it answered a distress call, pointing out that ART was not configured for that kind of emergency response. ART resists until Amena admits that the recent violence and the gray attackers have frightened her and that she wants the truth, not a convenient cover story. ART then cuts Eletra out of the shared feed, demands secrecy from SecUnit and the Preservation group, and threatens to kill Eletra if they reveal what it is about to say to the corporate representative.

After Eletra is settled alone in a bunkroom, the others meet in the galley. ART reveals that its teaching and research functions are real, but that it and its crew also work for anti-corporate organizations connected to Mihira, New Tideland, and their university. ART came to this lost system to determine whether an abandoned corporate colony still had survivors and, if so, to prevent salvage corporations from exploiting them. ART explains that its network can create or reconstruct charter documents, establish a protective contract with an independent station, and thereby shield surviving colonists from corporate takeover.

The group reviews ART’s fragmentary report on the colony. The report indicates that a corporate colony seeded by Adamantine Explorations may have been rediscovered after a hostile takeover recovered deleted wormhole coordinates, and that an even older Pre-Corporation Rim colony may also have existed on the same world. The humans discuss whether the gray attackers, whom SecUnit calls Targets, might descend from either colony and whether alien remnant contamination could explain their behavior and archaic technology. ART supplies a timeline of its arrival, memory disruption, crew disappearance, forced attack on a corporate carrier, deletion, and backup restart, but it omits details that would make its manipulation of SecUnit and the others even clearer.

Tension worsens when ART and SecUnit keep provoking each other, including ART’s private attempts to contact SecUnit and Amena. Arada finally stops the argument and turns the group toward action. She and Overse will study the alien remnant attached to ART’s drive, Ratthi and Thiago will examine the dead Targets and work on language identification, Amena will question Eletra again, and SecUnit will investigate how the Targets first got aboard and forced ART’s initial reinitialization. ART agrees to support the plan for now, shifting the story from immediate combat survival into a coordinated investigation.