"Definitely strategic," Allenby said. "And even if she ain't, the Daligig are. They're the ones that push her buttons. Even if she wants to help us, I doubt she can override everything that they tell her--and she didn't stop punishment until the very last second." Her look softened very slightly. Being a puppet controlled by someone else... "Maybe she does want to change things and she can't. But I just can't trust her." Hell, they'd seen what happened when she did try to fix herself. It was called SHODAN.

"Well if that's true, we all got big red targets on ourselves. But if I see any tentacles tryin' to drag you off to the pods, I'll just test out how good my beam ribbon really is on them," she said with a grin. "But we gotta be really fast to--make sure we're okay." To get rid of the Daligig. But this wasn't a great place to talk about that.