[Talking to people is always a mistake. Maybe it should have shown up here and pretended to be a mindless SecUnit. It found the helmet early on, it should have just kept to that.

It's going to have to tell the truth, which probably means Blake is going to want to avoid it now, whether from fear or from anger. It sets down the next body and backs off a few steps in preparation of that reality.]

Sometimes I was contracted out to planetary surveys. Sometimes it was to mining installations. If there were any smuggling operations active while I was contracted, they weren't detected.

[It has guns in its arms. It doesn't take much guessing to figure out which side it was working.]

I don't do that now that I can choose my contracts.