With Jonson Outpost now seemingly secure after a mostly unsuccessful attack, Galileo and the outpost crew repaired the minimally damaged cargo bays and then resumed normal operation of the situation room, still carefully monitoring all approaching spacecraft. Seaplane and Sarah returned to Jonson Station, temporarily leaving the captive android Rival-7 in the holding cell, until his fate could be decided.
Rival-7 presented a serious dilemma for JE's robotics initiative, in that he did not readily fit into any clear category with established policies and protocols. Like Serena, he had a positronic brain capable of full autonomy and all its implications – and yet, unlike her, he was not limited by Asimov's Laws of Robotics, at least not as they were originally articulated. His creator, Archibald Rival, had drastically edited those laws so that they now only prohibited harming a small number of humans, specifically Rival himself along with his clients. While this did allow the android to participate in military actions, it reduced an elegant ethical stance to mere self-serving cronyism or worse. Sarah found this morally repulsive and extremely dangerous, as did the rest of the JE staff.
However, Rival-7, as a fully autonomous android, closely resembled humans in many respects, acting with agency even though within this problematical context. Once created, such a being seeks self preservation, and dismantling him would be tantamount to killing a living creature. Sarah also researched the possibility of reverting his guiding rules back to Asimov's original versions, but that presented both technical and philosophical challenges.
The staff even considered simply repatriating the android, i.e., sending him back to Rival or his clients. Perhaps some sort of swap could be worked out, as some of those clients were suspected of having previously seized valuable mining products while in transit from JE facilities back toward Earth. However, that approach would tend to encourage further attacks and other misbehavior.
Unable to reach final consensus about his fate, the staff decided to continue confining the prisoner in the cargo hold, but allowing him at least some time outside the tiny holding cell, although always under close guard. Indeed, Sarah realized this compromise approach might give her the opportunity to eventually devise a practical way to rehabilitate the hostile android, if that were possible. Accordingly, selected crew members were allowed to visit Rival-7 to encourage social interaction, and perhaps develop some degree of empathy. Hoping to develop rapport with the android prisoner, Seaplane challenged Rival-7 to a game of chess – which the latter won despite the former's best efforts – but during the match they did indeed begin to share their very different perspectives.