SecUnit takes injured Amena out of the damaged facility in EVAC suits and starts moving her toward the baseship. During the transit, the attacking vessel fires two shots that miss, and SecUnit realizes the ship attached to the facility is not an unknown hostile at all but ART, the research transport it once knew. Before the baseship can recover them, ART catches both suits in a tractor beam and pulls them aboard as it accelerates into the wormhole, cutting them off from Preservation’s people.

Inside, the ship looks clean and familiar, but ART does not answer SecUnit’s pings and the normal feed is inaccessible. Amena panics, and SecUnit tries to keep her calm while confirming from the suit markings that the ship really is Perihelion. Because the silence suggests ART is absent, constrained, or compromised, SecUnit removes both EVAC suits, releases its drones, and starts searching the ship while trying to get Amena somewhere safer and to medical care.

Before SecUnit can gain control of the situation, a stealth drone slams into its head and causes a brief shutdown. While recovering, SecUnit listens through its drone relay and hears two gray-skinned intruders interrogating Amena about a supposed weapon on the survey facility. SecUnit realizes the hostiles are using an encrypted internal drone feed, breaks into it, and tracks Amena’s location in a crew lounge.

SecUnit enters the lounge and finds Amena cornered with two other captives, later identified as Barish-Estranza employees Eletra and Ras. Two hostile augmented beings and their drones confront SecUnit. When SecUnit demands to know what they did to ART, one hostile says they deleted the bot pilot. That claim enrages SecUnit: it hacks the hostile drones, shuts them down, and kills Target Two outright after wounding Target One. When Target One flees toward the bridge, SecUnit’s own drones pursue; Target Three appears on the control deck and tries to send an all-ship order, but SecUnit uses its drones to kill both remaining hostiles there as well.

Eletra and Ras urge immediate escape because more drones are coming, and Amena insists SecUnit stop fighting and move. SecUnit confirms that additional hostile drones are converging and that it still cannot fully control the ship’s systems. After warning Amena never to touch it again, SecUnit takes the lead, uses ART’s layout to choose a route, and guides Amena, Eletra, and Ras away from the lounge while ART itself remains silent and the larger takeover remains unresolved.