After leaving the router site and getting out of sight of the Barish-Estranza team, SecUnit scans for stealth drones and stops leaning on Ratthi. Iris, worried about SecUnit, asks SecUnit to stay with the router team for the final installation, and SecUnit agrees. ART recalls SecUnit’s shuttle to make the corporate team think they have departed.

As the team travels to the next router, SecUnit reviews the broader situation. The rescue plan depends on decontaminating the colonists’ old proprietary MedUnits, building a legal case to block Barish-Estranza from claiming the colonists as salvage, and determining whether the contaminated site can be sealed. The colonists’ internal factions make even asking them what they want difficult, while Barish-Estranza now has stronger forces nearby and the University support ship has not arrived.

While Iris and Tarik work on the router, SecUnit monitors Karime and Three at a negotiation inside the secondary colony. Three is out of armor and pretending to be an awkward augmented human, with SecUnit coaching Three’s human-like movements. Karime meets Bellagaia, Danis, Variset, and other colonists in a carved underground room, trying to persuade divided factions to cooperate long enough to avoid corporate salvage.

Before Karime can begin that argument, Bellagaia reveals that there is another colony site on the planet, near the polar terraforming engines. The site split off nearly thirty years earlier, contact stopped about twenty years ago, and communication is blocked by interference from the terraforming batteries. The news alarms ART’s crew because ART’s earlier scans could plausibly have missed a low-impact colony hidden by the interference, and because the additional population may disrupt resource estimates and the legal case based on the colony charter.

Corian, the colonists’ historian, explains that the polar group was separatist and never shared its exact location. Corian adds that records mention the separatists possibly settling underground in a cave system, which raises the possibility that they found another Pre–Corporation Rim site or even an alien remnant site. Karime thanks the colonists and urges them not to reveal the information to Barish-Estranza, while Mensah and the others recognize that the discovery creates a serious new complication.